Amador County, California Bridges: State Route 88 Bridge across the Middle Fork of Jackson Creek

March 2013 (38.35000°, -120.77028°) State Route 88 Bridge

Next to yesterday's Pitt Street Bridge is the State Route 88 Bridge across the Middle Fork of Jackson Creek. It's supposed to be a 5 span continuous concrete slab bridge, so I assume the first and last spans are hidden by curtain walls. The bridge is supported on pier walls that are preferred over fast moving streams (earthquake engineers don't like pier walls because they are shear-critical in the strong direction). The bridge is also on a high skew (earthquake engineers also don't like high skews) and it was built in 1948.

The Highway 88 Bridge is 122 ft long with a 36 ft long main span over the creek.  It carries about 10,000 vehicles a day and has a sufficiency rating of 73. Caltrans and the FHWA recently went through a major exercise to determine scour critical bridges in California and this bridge was determined to be okay.

Amador County, California Bridges: State Route 88 Bridge across the Middle Fork of Jackson Creek by Mark Yashinsky is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.