Monterey County, California Bridges: Bixby Creek Bridge

March 1999 (36.37192, -121.90197) Bixby Creek Bridge

Continuing down Highway 1 we arrive at the iconic Bixby Creek Bridge. I last wrote about this bridge in my blog of February, 2009. In the photo above Caltrans and Lawrence Livermore Labs are installing sensors to obtain the modal frequencies of the bridge before it is retrofit.

All of the sensors were installed in the morning and in the afternoon a truck filled with electronic equipment recorded the modal frequencies using the ambient vibration of passing vehicles.

Monterey County, California Bridges: Bixby Creek Bridge by Mark Yashinsky is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Monterey County, California Bridges: Big Creek Bridge

(36.07000, -121.59833) Big Creek Bridge

Continuing along Highway 1 on the Pacific Coast we arrived at the Big Creek Bridge, a 600 ft long bridge with two 180 ft long arch spans. This bridge was designed in 1938 by Christian Gutleben who made a specialty of designing arch bridges in California.

Like most of the bridges along the coast, the Big Creek Bridge is a 24 ft wide bridge with two traffic lanes and no shoulders. And like most of these bridges along the coast, the concrete is in poor shape due to the marine environment.

Monterey County, California Bridges: The New Dolan Creek Bridge

(36.106, -121.625) New Dolan Creek Bridge

In 1960 the old Dolan Creek Bridge was replaced with a precast girder bridge. This two lane bridge is 400 ft long and supported on single column hammerhead bents. The bridge got a seismic retrofit in 1986 that consisted of cable restrainers. In 1996 a second seismic retrofit provided triangular shear walls at Bent 2 and Bent 3. However, erosion of the slope and deterioration of the concrete suggest that this bridge may need to be replaced again before too long.