On October 22, 2010, the New York Times (
visit link) ran the following story:
"Come for the Highway. Stay for the View.
By MARC LACEY
Published: October 22, 2010
BOULDER CITY, Nev. — It is an engineering marvel and an acrophobe’s nightmare. And even in its first week, it is a tourist attraction.
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Just south of Hoover Dam, which has been called one of the engineering wonders of the world, is a brand new wonder, a massive bridge spanning the Colorado River gorge and connecting Arizona and Nevada. Towering 900 feet above the river in a majestic mountain setting, the 1,900-foot-long bridge is the seventh-highest in the world and the longest single-span concrete arch bridge in the Western hemisphere. And it offers a commanding view of the dam below.
“How did they do it?” asked Curt Gordon, a postal worker from Las Vegas who joined hundreds of others this week on the bridge’s pedestrian walkway. “There’s no better view, unless you’re in a helicopter.”
Not everybody was enjoying the vista, however. Carmen Lee of Dallas had been visiting Las Vegas with her husband when he decided they ought to see the bridge. “I don’t like heights,” she said, keeping a healthy distance from the guardrail. “Look down there. See how tiny the people are. It’s scary.”
Over at Hoover Dam, those tiny people were pointing their cameras at the new structure. The bridge opened to traffic on Tuesday night, and to pedestrian traffic on Thursday.
“I’m a civil engineer, and it’s amazing to me, just amazing,” said Randy Wiggins of Jacksonville, Ala., his head cocked upward in the direction of the bridge. “I’ve never seen anything quite like it.”
Discussed for decades, the bridge is intended to create a faster route between Phoenix and Las Vegas, a major trucking route in the Southwest.
Previously, traffic had to navigate a narrow two-lane highway that went right over the dam. After the Sept. 11 attacks, trucks were diverted to a more circuitous route through Bullhead City, Ariz., and Laughlin, Nev., out of concern that the dam might be a terrorist target. But traffic continued to be a problem; along the narrow, winding road where drivers like to slow to snap photos of the dam, the crash rate is three times higher than on the rest of Highway 93.
The bridge is officially named the Mike O’Callaghan-Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge. Mr. O’Callaghan was a governor of Nevada, a Korean War veteran and a newspaper editor. Mr. Tillman played for the Arizona Cardinals football team before joining the Army and dying in a friendly fire incident in Afghanistan in 2004.
Although visitors packed the site this week, there was some concern that the bridge might actually result in less tourism at the dam itself. Travelers who drove right over the dam often stopped at the spur of the moment for tours. Now, drivers will need to travel several miles off Highway 93 to reach it.
As it is, more than a million people a year visit the dam, with about 800,000 taking tours of its inner workings. “We don’t know if we’re going to have fewer people who say: ‘We’re here anyway. Let’s go look around,’ ” said Colleen Dwyer, a spokeswoman for the federal Bureau of Reclamation, the Department of the Interior agency that runs the dam.
Some of those on the bridge, though, were fascinated by its construction, the 16 million pounds of steel, the 30,000 cubic yards of concrete and the two million feet of cable used to erect it out of the jagged walls of Black Canyon.
“It’s just as impressive as the Hoover Dam itself,” said Jose Zamora, a retiree from San Francisco, who drove over the bridge and then walked it. The bridge’s designers put up concrete partitions along the traffic lanes to block drivers from seeing the dam and getting distracted at high speeds.
Harold Hata, an engineer from Las Vegas, was snapping pictures from the bridge’s walkway this week. He estimated that in the six years it took to build the bridge, he visited about a dozen times to photograph it slowly going up. “It’s an amazing engineering feat,” he said, gazing off into the distance at Lake Mead, the reservoir on the Nevada side of the dam that has its water levels at historic lows.
The challenges of putting up the $240 million structure were many. In 2006, high winds toppled cranes at the construction site, causing a significant delay. Wind will be a continuing challenge, officials say. Trucks, buses, mobile homes and other large vehicles will be banned from the bridge when wind gusts reach 50 miles an hour.
At the opening ceremony last week, politicians pointed out that Hoover Dam went up during the Great Depression and that this project comes during another significant economic downturn.
“America can still build great things,” Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said. “Not just in spite of economic hardships, but as a means of overcoming them.'”