Ecuador's Bridges: Puente Rio Baba (5)

A view of the bottom of one of the towers for Puente Rio Baba. The pins for each tower (and a metal frame for each anchorage) are placed in the concrete before it is cured. Then the towers can be raised (usually with the help of a truck) and the suspension cables are attached to the top of the tower saddles and to the anchorages. Two or three struts provide lateral stability to the towers.

As I previously mentioned, the suspension cable has the same angle on each side of the tower so that the longitudinal force on each side of the tower is equal.  Also note that the hangers are made from a single cable that descends from one suspension cable, goes through a hole in one side of the floor beam, back up through a hole in the other side, and back up to the other suspension cable.

Ecuador's Bridges: Puente Rio Baba (5) by Mark Yashinsky is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.