What It Takes to Keep a 7,700-Foot Floating Bridge From Doom
Learn about the science behind floating bridges from WIRED.
Washington’s love of floating bridges can be traced to the topography around Seattle. Lake Washington, east of the city, plunges to a depth of more than 200 feet, and the bottom is, from an engineering perspective, crap. It’s soft silt, which makes building a conventional suspension bridge with rooted towers quite difficult (read: expensive). Each tower would have to be about 630 feet tall, the state DOT says—twice the height of the sentinels holding up the Brooklyn Bridge.
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Last week I drove across the new Eastbound lanes. Pretty nice bridge – when it’s not just a floating parking lot.