Hawaii's Bridges: Hawaii Belt Road over Wailoa Stream

April 2001 (19.723 Degrees, -155.070 Degrees) Hilo Harbor Bridge

Just west of Lihiwai Street is a two span bridge that carries Kamehameha Avenue over Wailola Stream at Hilo Harbor. It is a continuous two-span T girder bridge that was built in 1938 and rebuilt/retrofitted in 1993. There are shear keys on the abutments and on the hammerhead bent, perhaps to protect the bridge from tsunami.

There are many reminders of past tsunami along the road including a clock that survived the 1946 tsunami but was stopped at the time of the 1960 tsunami, at 1:04 AM. I saw many similarly stopped clocks along the Japanese coast after the March 2011 tsunami. The community that lived along the shore here was destroyed, many people were killed, and the residential neighborhoods were never rebuilt but turned into parks.

Hawaii's Bridges: Hawaii Belt Road over Wailoa Stream by Mark Yashinsky is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.