This sounds like how they constructed the Zilwakee Bridge over the Saginaw River in Michigan back in the early 80's. They had problems as well, not with the design, but with the rigging of the prefabbed sections.
Here's a shot showing the gantry that was used to lift the sections into place. It was designed to literally 'walk' along the roadway:
September 1982 (Minolta XG-M)
Here you see the problem, one section tilted because the supports holding it started collapse and the sections no longer lined-up and so they couldn't lift the next section into place:
September 1982 (Minolta XG-M)
And this shot shows where the poor supports gave way. As you can see there was quite a load applied to that section of the bridge past the hinge point. I was just too much for the temporary supports:
September 1982 (Minolta XG-M)
They of course immediately halted construction and eventually fired the company building the bridge. After a couple of years looking into what happened, suing the contractors and so on, they finally hired a new company to finish the job. They didn't really do anything to the design of the bridge itself, just came-up with some better methods for rigging the bridge sections in place. Anyway, they finally finished the bridge about five or six years late. The irony was that just before they finished the bridge, the reason for it even being built was no longer an issue. You see, Interstate 75, a very busy highway crossed the Saginaw Rive vie a drawbridge which had to be raised at least two and something three or four times a day to allow a ship that delivered sand, sucked-up from the bottom of Saginaw Bay, to a pair of GM foundries where they did grey iron and malleable iron casting, mostly engine blocks and other cast iron items used by GM in their cars and trucks. And when the drawbridge was open, particularly in the Summer or during deer season when a lot of people were heading to the Northern part of the state, this could cause traffic to back-up for miles.
Just after they announced the new contract to finish the bridge and restart the work, GM announced that they we were closing the two foundries where that ship delivered sand to once or twice a day. So by the time the bridge was finally finished and it was opened to traffic, it was almost unneeded. If they had not built the new bridge, the old drawbridge would have only needed to be opened maybe four times a YEAR when ships delivered road salt to the highway department's depot a few miles past the bridge.
BTW, this bridge they built was AFTER they had already constructed a bypass section of the interstate that was routed so that while it still crossed the Saginaw River, it was just past where any ships would have been able to go in the first place, but this bypass added maybe 10 minutes to the average person's drive who was heading North on vacation or to go hunting or skiing and that was just too much to ask, so they dreamed-up the bridge.
John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
EX-'Product Evangelist'
Irvine, CA
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