Miyagi, Japan's Bridges: Kitakami River Bridge (7)

March 2012 (38.547 Degrees, 141.423 Degrees) Kitakami Bridge

We saw in a previous blog how the truss spans had been scarred by debris carried by the tsunami. However as seen in the photo above the five southeastern spans remained on their piers and were still functional. The waves must have been higher and faster along the northwest shore where the spans were carried upstream. Note the damaged concrete shear keys, cable restrainers, and broken bearings on the abutment and pier.

The missing spans were originally supported on the bank that is  dry during low tide (see photo below).

Miyagi, Japan's Bridges: Kitakami River Bridge (7) by Mark Yashinsky is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License.