New Zealand's Bridges: Horotane Overbridges in Christchurch (1)

March 2011 (-43.573 Degrees, 172.695 Degrees) Horotane Overbridges

Next to the Port Hills Bridges are a pair of simple span precast I girder bridges on tall hammerhead bents. The columns are tall because the road is coming down from the mountains. This made the embankments too steep (in the view of the geotechnical engineer in our group) and resulted in slope stabilty failures. Very little bridge damage, though. We observed horizontal cracks on the sides of the columns facing the street (see drawing).

We'll take another look at this bridge tomorrow.  

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