The one kind of surprise you might want if you were moving more than 500 ft of bridge section would be to have things slip and slide along even more smoothly than expected. That is what happened over Memorial Day weekend in Cleveland as crews moved the Innerbelt Bridge 4 in. to open up an expansion joint.
Using a painstakingly coordinated cast of hydraulic rams and jacks, crews pushed about 10 million lb of bridge section westward. The feat frees up an expansion joint on the west section, previously blocked by the eastward shift of the truss due to a slope’s slow slide on the western end of the Cuyahoga River.