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calendar   Tuesday - March 05, 2013

Anybody got any iron rope?

Older Than The State That It’s In,

Oldest Suspension Bridge In USA Snaps A Cable,

Closed Awaiting Repairs



Built long before West Virginia became a state in 1863, the suspension bridge at Wheeling over the Ohio River was a wonder of it’s age. Made from iron and stone, the 1849 bridge is 1307 feet long and 949 feet between the towers. The 12 iron cables for the bridge were made from 455,400 pounds of wrought iron wire, laid out on the main street of the town and wrapped by hand. When it was new it was the longest bridge in the world, and until yesterday it still carried vehicular traffic, which makes it the oldest “long span” bridge in the world still in regular use.


image

No, the bridge deck is not bent. The bridge actually goes uphill



Cable Snaps On Suspension Bridge
WHEELING - Motorists and pedestrians were forced to use alternate routes to and from Wheeling Island late Saturday afternoon after a routine inspection of the Wheeling Suspension Bridge showed that a major cable on the downtown Wheeling side had snapped near the top of the bridge.

While the cable is not a “load bearing” cable, it does help to prevent the bridge from swaying. That prompted West Virginia Division of Highways officials to close down the bridge with barricades to motorists and pedestrians.

With the Celtic Festival and a Wheeling Nailers hockey game slated last night in downtown Wheeling, traffic normally traveling across the suspension bridge was forced to use the Fort Henry Bridge to access the downtown area. Some traffic back-ups resulted.

image

Notice the Fink Truss style support wires in addition to those hanging from the catenaries

These are called Auxiliary Stays and are nearly a trademark Roebling artifact, although he did not design the bridge



Highways officials are expected to return to the bridge on Monday to further assess the damage. It is not known when the bridge will reopen.

In October, officials announced the Suspension Bridge would receive an $8.2 million facelift sometime in 2013.

The bridge, originally built in 1849, was severely damaged by a wind storm in 1854 and rebuilt in 1856.

The bridge has withstood many incidents over the years including major damage to a portion of its decking in 2010 after a vehicle accident took out several sections of the sidewalk.

The Wheeling Suspension Bridge was the first span to cross the Ohio River and remains the oldest vehicular suspension bridge still in use. The bridge is just over 1,000 feet in length and its major cables are anchored to masonry walls located under Main Street. One set of the cables can be found in the sub-basement at the Capitol Theatre.

more bridge info, loads of pics.

some historical pics, including Elephants!.

Interestingly, the center of the Wheeling bridge deck is nearly free floating. There are no secondary “Fink style” support wires coming down from the towers, the deck bracing is an open top “pony Brown” archaic “X"design similar to a Howe truss (except it predates Brown by a decade), and the deck itself is above the trough of the catenary. All this together means that there isn’t much other than force of habit holding up the middle 15% of the bridge, but it’s worked just fine for 164 years now. Compare this pic of the Wheeling to this one of the Bear Mountain which uses a fully boxed (aka “through truss") Warren truss with full verticals and to this one of the Rainbow Bridge in Japan which also uses a massive full Warren for the deck boxing and keeps the catenaries quite high for maximum twist reduction. Both of these have plenty of redundancy built in. The Wheeling doesn’t have much, and it had even less to begin with: It was Roebling (Mr. Brooklyn Bridge) or one of his sons who added the auxiliary stays around 1871. Before that the Wheeling was rather bouncy.


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Posted by Drew458   United States  on 03/05/2013 at 12:00 AM   
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