New Zealand's Bridges: Chaney's Overpass in Christchurch (1)

March 2011 (-43.430 Degrees, 172.646 Degrees) Chaney's Overpass

There are just a few highway bridges around Christchurch. Chaney's Overpass is a three span precast box girder bridge that carries southbound Route 1 over the new road that connects northbound Route 1 to the Main North Road. 

This bridge site has some nice sand boils and other signs of liquefaction from the series of earthquakes that started in September of 2010 and has continued sporadically ever since.

New Zealand has made an art and science of building precast girder bridges that are continuous for several spans. This bridge is supported on big pier walls. If you look closely, you can see a construction joint at the top of the walls, but with the wall reinforcement continuing up into the superstructure.The girders are cantilevered over the pier walls and made continuous with drop-in spans over the road and at the abutments.

We'll take another look at this interesting bridge tomorrow.

New Zealand's Bridges: Chaney's Overpass in Christchurch (1) by Mark Yashinsky is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.