Between now and year-end, a contractor in central Liverpool will tear down a viaduct with a replacement value of around $70 million and crush and recycle the rubble as fill for a new highway in the U.K. city. The fate of Churchill Way is one of the most dramatic consequences of a new inspection regime of post-tensioned concrete bridges that emerged from the rubble of collapses nearly 30 years ago.
The defunct contractor G. Percy Trentham Ltd. built Churchill Way, which opened in 1970, to designs by what was then WS Atkins and Partners. Two roughly 240-m-long diverging viaducts were planned as part of an inner beltway that was never completed.