New Zealand's Bridges: ANZAC Bridge across the Avon River in Christchurch (1)

March 2011 (-43.501 Degrees, 172.701 Degrees) ANZAC Bridge

We are nearing the end of the Avon River and its beginning to suggest the salt water environment that it will become a few miles downstream. This is another ANZAC Bridge, dedicated to the many soldiers from Australia and New Zealand who bravely laid down their lives during WWI. New Zealand seems like a place where patriotism and religion are still very important. Also sports and meat pies.

The ANZAC Bridge was one of the newest bridges on the Avon and also one of the most damaged during the recent earthquakes. It's a totally precast structure and so the bridge has some of the seismic problems that we are currently trying to solve in California: how to design a precast bridge with super strong connections and predetermined locations where damage can occur. This is a problem that Park and Pauley at the University of Canterbury worked on in the 1980s. Of course, this bridge is still standing, which is good, but the damage suggests that it might have failed in shear had the earthquake been a little bigger. We'll take a closer look at it tomorrow.

New Zealand's Bridges: ANZAC Bridge across the Avon River in Christchurch (1) by Mark Yashinsky is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.