Amador County, California Bridges: State Route 49 across Sutter Creek (3)

August 2005 (38.3936 Degrees, -120.8161 Degrees) Sutter Creek Bridge

The designer of the Sutter Creek Bridge (Eric Zechlin) sent me some photos of it being built (the photo above is stitched together). I also downloaded the plans but they were in metric which was confusing (Caltrans tried metric for a few years but then switched back). The deck is 390 meters above mean sea level and the footing is at 350 meters so the bridge is about 130 ft tall. I'm a little surprised they built a 130 ft tall pier on spread footings without any lateral support. I would imagine a large earthquake could knock it over but maybe it would just rock it back and forth.

Tomorrow we'll look at the falsework. Eric told me they had an accident with the falsework but that no one was hurt. 

Amador County, California Bridges: State Route 49 across Sutter Creek (3) by Mark Yashinsky is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.