Washington State Bridges: Aurora Bridge

From the last few day's photos, Seattle looks like it has many large bodies of water and many large bridges. At least it looked that way to me during my two visits to Seattle.

The Aurora Bridge (also called the George Washington Memorial Bridge) crosses the Ship Canal just west of Lake Union. The double-deck Ship Canal Bridge (from Tuesday's blog) is just east of Lake Union.  The canal carries ships from Puget Sound to Lake Washington. Consequently, both bridges provide vertical clearance to all but the tallest masted schooners.

I would call the Aurora Bridge a truss arch, although it could also be called a cantilever bridge.  It was completed in 1932 and was the tallest bridge (with 167 ft vertical clearance) in Seattle for many years. It is 2,945 ft long with a 475 ft long arch span and a 70 ft width.  Seattle has a lot of traffic with many commuters and this bridge carries over 71,000 vehicles every day.

Washington State Bridges: Aurora Bridge by Mark Yashinsky is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.