Ibaraki, Japan's Bridges: Rokko Bridge across Kitaura Lake (1)

June 2011 (36.086 Degrees, 140.540 Degrees) Rokko Bridge

The Rokko Bridge is a 405 m long steel girder bridge on piers composed of four battered steel piles.  The approaches settled (see photo below) and the bridge lost two piers and three spans during the Tohoku earthquake. This was similar to the damage that occurred to the Showa Bridge during the 1964 Niigata earthquake and probably had the same cause: loss of strength and stiffness of the soil due to liquefaction.

Ibaraki, Japan's Bridges: Rokko Bridge across Kitaura Lake (1) by Mark Yashinsky is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.