Hasta La Gadget!

Take a look on, inside and underneath the world’s largest self-anchored suspension bridge in this exclusive Wired.com video.

The Bay Bridge is nearing the end of a $7-billion-plus retrofit and reconstruction project. A $5.4 billion chunk of that project involves building the world’s largest self-anchored suspension bridge, a type of suspension bridge that uses a single cable, anchored to the span itself instead of to the ground on either end. When complete, this bridge will have a 525-foot tower and will be over 2,000 feet long.

To make the suspension bridge, builders must first create a “falsework” bridge: a giant, temporary structure that will hold up the road bed until the suspension tower and cables are in place. Then they place segments of the tower (shipped in from China), stack them up and bolt them together. Then they’ll place the road deck segments and lace it all together with cables. Once it’s under tension, builders will remove the falsework and the bridge will stand on its on.

They must do all this without interrupting the flow of more than 250,000 vehicles per day. They’ve got to anchor the bridge in deep layers of soft, squishy bay mud, without the benefit of bedrock, while making the bridge strong enough to withstand the most powerful earthquake expected in the next 1,500 years. And they’ve got to do it all without destroying the habitats for fish, birds, or other wildlife which still call the San Francisco Bay home.

It all adds up to an impressive high-tech engineering project. Take a look in this video, produced by Michael Lennon with sound by Fernando Cardoso.

See Also:

• Gallery: How to Build an Earthquake-Resistant Bridge
• Bridging the Future: Behind the Scenes at the Bay Bridge …
• When a Bridge Becomes a Lifeline

Follow us for real-time tech news: Dylan Tweney and Gadget Lab on Twitter.