If you’ve ever been to Hoover Dam, you understand that in addition to being a huge water management project, above and beyond creating a massive lake, even more than creating gigawatts of electricity, Hoover Dam is part of a functional federal highway.  Well, sort of.  Highway U.S. 93 is a two-lane road on the Dam as it runs from Arizona to Montana.  Even if the Dam itself were not a massive tourist destination, 2 lanes would hardly be sufficient.  Add to that the potential of the Dam as a terrorist target — truck traffic hasn’t been allowed since 2001 — and it was almost inevitable that someday they would have to build a bridge to add capacity and bypass the Hoover Dam itself.

The bridge is supposed to be finished in 2010, and the crane system needed to make it all happen should be working by the end of the month.

The new pulley-type, “high-line” crane system was designed and specifically built with the bypass project in mind, said Dave Zanetell, a Federal Highway Administration engineer overseeing the project. “The other system was basically brought in from another construction site.”

More than a year ago, two pairs of 280-foot towers that made up the other system collapsed amid 55 mph winds.

The high-line system is needed to carry up to 50 tons of materials and workers about 1,100 feet over the Colorado River via 2,300-foot-long steel cables that stretch between the towers and over the gorge.

Here’s more information about the bridge itself:

The 1,905-foot bridge will include an 890-foot span over the river. It will provide four lanes for the U.S. Highway 93 traffic that currently uses the two-lane road over the dam.

About 17,000 cars and trucks are expected to use the new bridge on a daily basis.

Today more than 2,000 trucks detour the dam via U.S. Highway 95 to a river crossing in Laughlin. Truck traffic was banned from the dam just after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The new structure will be named the Mike O’Callaghan-Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge. O’Callaghan was a popular two-term governor of Nevada, and Tillman was a patriotic Arizona Cardinals football star who joined the military after the 2001 attacks and was killed accidentally by his fellow U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan.

Pretty cool stuff.

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Posted in Las Vegas Commercial Development Nevada by Bridget Magnus Comments Off