City of Bloomington, MN What's Developing, 13 Jan 2016

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From YouTube: Old Cedar Avenue Bridge – January 2016

Description

Over the last seven months, crews have been making progress on the Old Cedar Avenue bridge rehabilitation. This video highlights what’s been going on so far.

A

As the seasons have changed, so has this.

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Work site: we are at the old cedar, avenue, bridge rehabilitation project, it started last May. We had got off to a slow start, but we regained some schedule and we're going gangbusters. You can hear the pile driving in the background.

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Senior civil engineer, Julie long oversees the project she broke down, what's happened so far. The.

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First, steps was: we had to have CenturyLink relocate some fiber optic lines that went under Long Meadow Lake.

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The second step was that the contractor built this temporary bridge that were standing on now as a work platform for their cranes to access the bridge and the next step was they built the shoring towers that you see behind us so that we could secure and lift the old cedar avenue, bridge up and off its pilings and then now we've actually started rehabilitation of the first span, which means we're popping out the old rivets and we're looking at the gusset plates and replacing some of those or painting and knocking off some of the pack for us, and they.

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Will do that four more times lifting each of the five spans a unique process, especially here the.

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City of Bloomington doesn't do a lot of old rehabilitation projects because a lot of the community was built in the early 50s yeah. We have our old town hall and we have some significant historic properties around town, but we don't have a lot of them. So it's a fairly unique project for the city of Bloomington. This.

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Distinctive historical structure was built in the 1920s and it was in rough shape. The biggest.

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Problems are on the lower chords and the lowers fans, salt, rust metal. So after time, some of the members had deteriorated and it can no longer carry the full function. The load for a road bridge.

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That's why it was replaced by trunk highway 77 in the 80s. Eventually, the old cedar avenue bridge closed to all traffic in 2002, but that will soon change for bikers and pedestrians right.

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Now there are a lot of people who use their bicycle to commutes to Bloomington, and you have to go about four miles out of your way, because we don't have a lot of crossings over the river or the lakes there are birders are excited because it will get them out into the lake to see more history.

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Buffs may also be happily surprised. The bridge is being restored to its original. Look that debuted almost a hundred years ago. It.

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Will look very similar to what the bridge looked like in 1920s? It won't look. What probably a lot of people remember. A lot of people remember the wood deck that got put in in the 50s. That's not original! Their original deck was concrete. So we're going to go back to the 1920 concrete we're going to paint it the same 1920s industrial gray color. So it won't be the lovely rusty metal that you see today. You.

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Can see here where they've already tested out the paint we.

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Are hoping that the bridge is done in the fall of 2016, but.

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People probably won't be able to use it until the following spring. That's because crews will have to remove this temporary span safely. The special mix lightweight concrete on the bridge will also need time to settle without salt, but by next year long hopes. This historical bridge will be a blast from the past. Everyone can enjoy.