Two Rivers

I was out of town for most of this week. I was in Two Rivers Wisconsin where my company is overseeing the construction of a movable bridge. It isn't one of my projects, but the engineer on site had to take some training classes and I filled in for him. I thought I would show you just how boring engineering work can be. Here is the bridge, you can see two cofferdams have been build and on the near side of the bridge they are driving piles.Here is a close up of the piles. In this particular case, bed rock is 120 feet below the water line. Normally a pile driver would be used to get the piles to the proper depth, but since it is 120 feet of muck the piles are just being vibrated down to 110 feet.Here is a concrete pump truck. We poured somewhere around 500 yards of concrete on the seal pour. The seal pour is within the cofferdam. This creates a seal and then the cofferdam can be pumped out and the bridge pier footings can be poured.Here they are getting a clog out of the pump.Since the seal is below the water, about 25 feet, there is nothing to see during the seal pour. Just the end of the concrete pump truck in the water. Incredibly unexciting.The pour was to start at 7:00 a.m. But there were problems with the concrete being out of specifications. We (I) rejected 12 trucks (108 cubic yards of concrete) before we poured anything into the water. The first concrete didn't hit the water until 9:30 a.m. The pour stretched out until 6:30 p.m. Here you can see some splicing of the piles going on (on the left). To reach 120 feet down, 2 60 foot sections of piles need to be welded together. This bridge has right around 100 piles that need to be driven 120 feet at $45 per foot of pile. Some quick math, that is $540,000. I forgot how much it was per cubic yard of concrete. But the first seal pour had a plan quantity of 433 cubic yards and the next seal pour is close to 1,000 cubic yards. I know, this is some real exciting stuff. Kids, do not grow up to be an engineer.Here you can see all of the piles that need to be driven.

And that is the life of an engineer.