It’s taken years of planning, engineering know-how and a dash of style. But when the two halves of this bridge are joined soon, North America’s busiest border crossing will have a new road to travel
The design of the Gordie Howe International Bridge is meant evoke the bend of a hockey stick making a slap shot. But as the mammoth project nears its biggest milestone to date, a more apt comparison would be Michelangelo’sFor nearly six years, the largest bridge ever built between Canada and the United States has grown in two separate parts, extending toward each other from opposite banks of the Detroit River.
This part of the process, in which the bridge deck grows segment by segment from both sides, is like a marathon of construction cycles, he said, “very repetitive but also very intensive.” “We’re seeing social media comments, we’re seeing how excited the community is about the bridge deck connection taking place. That’s a real inspiration for us,” said Heather Grondin, chief relations officer for the Windsor Detroit Bridge Authority, the Crown corporation that the federal government created a dozen years ago to oversee the project.
“From the public standpoint, it becomes an iconic structure,” said Habib Tabatabi, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. “It really is a beautiful sight to see.” It will also shorten the connection between major highways on either side of the river, offering trucks an alternative to trundling through local streets on their way to the nearest crossing.
French explorers who plied the river in the 17th century were taken with the bounty they saw crowding its banks, including forests filled with game, timber and wild fruits. Compared with Quebec, with its harsher northern climate, the warmer and lush climate of the region made it a veritable garden of Eden.
The challenge then, as now, was building a bridge tall enough to allow for commercial ships going up and down the river. The answer then was to make it a suspension bridge. This design relies on a pair of giant metal cables to support a steel bridge deck. But bridging an expanse as wide as the Detroit River is not a trivial exercise. When the privately owned Ambassador Bridge was completed in 1929 it was the largest suspension bridge in the world.
For designers, the trade-off was having to span the full width of the river with towers positioned just over 850 metres apart. This is approaching the upper limit for a cable-stayed design, which is considered to be about 1,000 metres. A suspension bridge can go longer, but a suspension bridge requires more material and additional anchorage for its cables, which introduces more cost. Instead, AECOM proposed what will be the longest cable-stayed bridge in North America.
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