Foresthill Bridge to undergo major upgrades
Major reconstruction on the stilletto-thin span, California's tallest bridge, begins this winter. Work will last three years. An additional $27 million will pay for a new green paint job.
Crews will add 2 million pounds of reinforcing steel with 190,000 bolts and attach vibration dampeners at each end of the span.
It's all for a bridge whose main reason for existing never came to pass. And to prepare for a seismic event that may never happen.
Opened in 1973, the bridge is a legacy of the aborted Auburn dam project. The span was to replace Highway 49 and old Foresthill Road, both of which would have been inundated by the dam's reservoir. Its construction would save the Foresthill community from being cut off from Auburn and the rest of civilization.
But a 1975 earthquake near Lake Oroville caused geologists to reassess the danger from other faults in the foothills fault system near Auburn.
A 1996 study by the U.S. Geological Survey further buried the dam idea when it determined those faults might move more strongly in an earthquake than once thought.
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