As most people know, CA governor Gray Davis said that there was a chance of a threat against California’s suspension bridges.
So, he rattled off four bridges that were going to be guarded: the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge (part cantilever and part suspension), the Golden Gate, the Vincent Thomas, and the Coronado Bridge.
I’ve been on the Coronado Bridge and I’ve looked up info on it. And it certainly isn’t a suspension bridge, but I can’t find out exactly what type of bridge the Coronado is?
Also, wouldn’t it be easier to destroy something a little less sturdy than the Golden Gate Bridge? I can’t imagine that some of the older freeway overpasses are less sturdy than the Golden Gate, although they have little symbolic value.
Of course, if the Vincent Thomas Bridge were destroyed, many people in Southern California would be asking themselves “There’s a Vincent Thomas Bridge?”
I will feel like the King of the World if I can actually help you with this, BobT.
If it’s the bridge I’m seeing here, and if I’m understanding what I’m seeing here, I would say it’s a “beam” bridge, called a different page on the latter site “the vanillas of the bridge world.”
Sorry, can’t help you there. Though in checking into the etymology of the words “beam,” “bridge,” and “vanilla,” I found that the latter derives from “vagina.” Does that help any?
it’s an orthotropic design, specifically “channel span - 3 span continuous orthotropic box girders” . I don’t even know what that means, but it sounds good.
The OED has an entry for “orthotropic” which does refer to bridge building.
The parts of the bridge consist of “three mutually perpendicular planes of elastic symmetry at each point.”
The Coronado Bridge is a very fun bridge to drive across. I would think its proximity to a lot of Naval personnel would make it hard for people to just mill around on it.
Apparently, the governor isn’t concerned about the Benicia or Carquinez bridges.
WAG: Could it be that the Govenor’s choice of bridges had more to do with appeasing widespread constituents than it did with actual traffic patterns or threat models?
