Posted 07.06.2012 at 1:03 pm
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Fort Steuben Bridge
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AP Photo/Herald Star/Michael D. McElwain
The 1,585-foot Fort Steuben Bridge spanned the Ohio River, linking Ohio to West Virginia for 84 years, but it took just seconds for it to drop in a controlled demolition in February. The Ohio Department of Transportation closed the aging concrete-and-steel suspension bridge in 2009 and finally hired general contractors Joseph B. Fay Company to take the bridge down. (Traffic that used to pass along the Fort Steuben now crosses the Ohio approximately 1,000 feet upriver on the Veterans Memorial Bridge, which opened in 1990.) After months of planning, over the course of a week, demolition experts placed 153 pounds of explosives, in 490 shaped charges, in 136 locations along the bridge. On demolition day, experts detonated explosives on the stiffening truss. Then they severed the main suspension cables and ultimately brought down the bridge’s two towers.
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Well, here is what I see: lot's of black body radiation emitted by incandescent soot, protective blankets blown to shreds, steel pulverized into pyrophoric spray.
Those black smoke plumes coming down give me unrest - what makes them cold enough to prevent glowing, while everything else shines brightly ?
Splashes on the water at the farther tower base betray that explosions propagated along the bridge towards the camera.
There are also two semitransparent bubbles just above the redbrick building roof - I wonder if those are condensation clouds.
153 pounds of explosives makes things go boom and fall down. I get and understand that. It would of been interesting to learn how they made this explosion happen exactly on time and I like to learn about the camera precisely take this well timed clear photo, too.
"Investigative Popular Science Reporting."
Hope it's okay to post a link here.
The Ohio Dept. of Transportation video for this is here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVNM8LFVzUE