As the first major highway cable stayed bridge in California, the new Gerald Desmond Bridge will be one of the tallest of its kind in the country once completed in mid-2018. Photo courtesy Shimmick Construction Company.

now going at full throttle. Approximately 148 of the total 351 piles had been placed as of early May, with an average of four piles being placed per week. “Because this is a new process for Cali-

fornia, there was quite a bit of evaluation on the design and scrutiny of the method,” Corn said. “Now that we’ve gotten through that stage, we’ve been very happy with the consistent results we’re seeing.”

Next Up: Building the Bridge Once the foundations are in place, the

next major challenge will be the actual bridge construction. The design calls for use of a self-launching, movable scaffold- ing system (MSS), a method that, while common in Europe and elsewhere, has not been used much in the United States. The project will utilize a massive gan- try, assembled on site, weighing over 1,300

Photo courtesy Shimmick Construction Co. 14 July/August 2015

tons and standing approximately 15 ft tall. The MSS method enables the bridge to be built on a span-by-span basis using col- umn supports that are up to 230 ft apart. The bridge construction process is slated to get underway later this summer. Also on the horizon is construction of

the two towers for the cable stay section. Rising some 515 ft into the air, those tow- ers will be built in 20-foot sections over the course of about a year. “The height poses the biggest challenge, and quality control has to be top notch,” Corn noted. All together, the bridge will be made

up of approximately 182,000 cubic yard of concrete, 17.5 million pounds of struc- tural steel and 72 million pounds of rebar, among other material quantities.

Putting People, Firms to Work in Southern California With a total project budget of about $1.3 billion, the new Gerald Desmond

California Constructor