Hoover Dam Bypass Bridge Wins Civil Engineering Award
ASCE presented this year's Charles Pankow Award for Innovation to American Engineering Testing, Inc. and the Cemstone Products Company for a new concrete mix design, which was chosen for using the "largest practical amount of recycled materials." They developed, demonstrated, and applied the use of supplemental cementitious materials in a revolutionary concrete mix that was used in building the replacement bridge in Minneapolis carrying Interstate 35W over the Mississippi, according to ASCE, which said waste stream materials that normally would end up in a landfill are 98 percent of the mix.
The Hoover Dam Bypass/Mike O'Callaghan-Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge, a Federal Highway Administration single-span concrete arch bridge, has won the 2012 Outstanding Civil Engineering Achievement Award from the American Society of Civil Engineers. The $240 million bridge was completed in 2010 and has been in use since then; it is the Western hemisphere's highest and longest arched concrete bridge at 1,900 feet and was built to reroute traffic around the Hoover Dam. It features that world's tallest precast concrete columns and was the first steel and concrete hybrid arch bridge to be constructed in the United States.
The other finalists for the award were the Cherry Island Landfill Vertical Expansion Project in Wilmington, Del.; the Naciemiento Water Project in San Luis Obispo, Calif.; the U.S. 191 Colorado River Bridge in Moab, Utah; and the Willamette River Combined Sewer Overflow Tunnel Program in Portland, Ore. Previous winners haved included the World Trade Center in New York City, the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, and the St. Lawrence Power and Seaway project in upstate New York.
"We are proud to be recognized for this great achievement, but the credit really goes to the workers who helped build it," U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said. "America can dream big because of the strength of our workers, and this iconic new bridge is proof."
The bridge is located 40 miles east of Las Vegas. Its construction began in 2005 and involved more than 1,200 workers. The entire bypass project included construction of eight bridges, interchanges in Arizona and Nevada, and the excavation of nearly 4 million cubic yards of rock.
This award was established in 1960.