New Zealand's Bridges: Gayhurst Road Bridge across the Avon River in Christchurch

March 2011 (-43.522 Degrees, 172.673 Degrees) Gayhurst Road Bridge

Continuing downstream past another bow in the river, the Avon is now wide enough to be crossed by a three span slab bridge on pier walls (built in 1954). We are east of the CBD, east of those 19th century ornamented bridges, and into an area of soil that was highly liquefied by the February earthquake. The piers on the Gayhurst Road Bridge have horizontal cracks due to intense shaking and lateral spreading. However, these cracks were not considered serious enough to stop traffic across the bridge (once the approaches were re-graded).

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