Vdot telegraph road bridge demolition april 6 2013
The Telegraph Road Bridge (TRB) is a multi-girder composite steel bridge built in 1973 in Monroe, Michigan, and designed to carry two lanes of northbound traffic on Interstate 275 (I-275). Monroe is located in the southeastern corner of Michigan and therefore sees heavy truck loads on its roads and bridges due to the large manufacturing industry in the area and its close proximity to the Canada–US border in Detroit. The total length of the TRB is approximately 224 feet (68 m) and is designed with three main spans. The end spans are each 48 feet (15 m) long and span from the bridge abutments to support piers with their spans cantilevering 6 feet (1.8 m) past the interior piers. The main span of 140 feet (43 m) suspends from the cantilevered end using pin and hanger assemblies. The bridge has seven steel girders in composite action with an eight-inch (20 cm) reinforced concrete deck. The bridge is also skewed with a skew angle of 57 degrees. TRB is owned and managed by the Michigan Department of Transportation (MDOT).
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Long-term Structural Monitoring System
The TRB has been selected for installation of a wireless long-term structural monitoring system to monitor the acceleration and strain response of the bridge to traffic and environmental loads. The sensing strategy of the wireless monitoring system is designed to target specific deterioration modalities commonly encountered in steel girder-concrete deck bridges located in the harsh northern climates of the United States. The wireless sensor network on the bridge is interfaced to the Internet via a cellular modem so that raw sensor data from the bridge can be stored in a scalable database system called SenStore. SenStore combines sensor data with bridge design information (e.g., geometric details, material properties) and exposes application programming interfaces that permit data processing tools to extract information from bridge data.