Good morning, 🐶🐶🐶
5 January 2025
Did you know that the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge began on this day in 1933. It was completed on 19 April 1937. That makes the bridge about 88 years old. I’ve been over and under the bridge, but not in five or six decades. It is golden bridge, across the golden straight, in the golden state. I wonder about the age of such manmade constructions and what it takes to keep them safe. I’d driven across the I35W Mississippi River Bridge in Minneapolis several times a few years ago. It was only about 40 years old when it collapsed a few years later.
“Roads do not upgrade or maintain themselves. Bridges do not repair themselves or rebuild themselves.” - Martin O’Malley
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@[email protected] Heh, I was two years old in 1964 when we had an extended business trip in the Bay Area and lived there, so that this was my last encounter with the Golden Gate Bridge.
And I used to commute over the bridge in Minneapolis. It collapsed, it turned out, because it was built with some gusset plates of metal that was too thin.
It seems worth remembering that part of the Bay Bridge collapsed in the 1989 earthquake. That whole side of the bridge has been replaced now, though.
@[email protected]
Yes, and then there are earthquakes, where the road moves like a snake. I haven’t felt an earthquake since leaving California decades ago. I wouldn’t want to be on a bridge during one of those.
@[email protected] When I was a teen I was in the old Princeton University hangar when that big slab of concrete shook real good. Someone asked “What was that?” and I speculated an earthquake. Though I was from nearby Kendall Park, where one could often feel blasts from the Trap Rock quarry. (There are enormous deposits of diabase in northern and central New Jersey.)
I once slept through a good shake in Ottawa, Ontario. I guess the epicenter was in the Gatineau Hills.