Comment by gusgus01

Comment by gusgus01 13 hours ago

3 replies

The two longest floating bridges in the world are in Seattle, Washington. The longest, Evergreen Point Floating Bridge, has a mixed use lane for cycling and walking and supposedly took 5 years to construct after construction started (ignoring that it replaced a bridge that existed there and also planning took longer, I'm not sure how to compare that). Seattle also has the world's only floating bridge that has rail on it, Homer M. Hadley Memorial Bridge, which is also the world's 5th longest floating bridge. While not the same exact sort of feat of engineering, it's pretty cool.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evergreen_Point_Floating_Bri... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lacey_V._Murrow_Memorial_Bri... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homer_M._Hadley_Memorial_Bri...

chihuahua 4 hours ago

And the best demonstration of Seattle's hapless "can't do" attitude is that they left the watertight doors open one day in 1990 and the bridge pontoons filled with water and the bridge sank. Back then, by some miracle the bridge was fixed in a few weeks, but today it would take 10 years.

When the light rail line was installed on the I-90 bridge, after the whole thing was done it was discovered that the rail ties were built incorrectly. This was in April 2023. Thousands of concrete ties had to be demolished and construction had to start over. Of course this took years. God forbid that someone should check the work along the way.

If Seattle was a Simpsons character, it would be Ralph Wiggum when he's grown up and has one foot permanently stuck in a bucket.

titanomachy 12 hours ago

> Evergreen Point Floating Bridge

> Homer M. Hadley Memorial Bridge

I’ve biked and driven across these bridges many times and I’m quite certain I’ve never heard these names until this moment.

  • gmueckl 11 hours ago

    Nobody in the Seattle area uses those names. They are always just the I-90 bridge or 520 bridge among the people I talk to, although both roads actually use multiple bridges to span Lake Washington.