Brit Reacts - Mackinac Bridge sure is MIGHTY!

[00:00:01]Mino.

[00:00:03]Mino.

[00:00:05]Mate, I better not get this wrong. Meno.

[00:00:09]Meno.

[00:00:13]You all right? How you doing? Thanks for joining me. So, today we're looking at bridges in particular the Machinar Bridge in Michigan. So, when I done my bridges video quite a few weeks back now, quite a few of you in the comments let me know at the time about this bridge. And I think mainly because it was mispronounced. I I can't remember what I would have said, but I do know it's the Machinar Bridge and it seems to have a lot of love. So, I thought, let's do a video dedicated to it and see why is it loved so much and how it came about. So, yeah, let's give it a watch.

[00:00:57]>> For supporting this video. Hey there.

[00:00:59]This is the longest suspension bridge in the Western Hemisphere.

[00:01:04]>> Welcome to the Meno Bridge.

[00:01:06]>> It's story time. The Meno Bridge is a 5m long suspension bridge that connects Michigan's lower and upper peninsula.

[00:01:14]>> Oh, okay. So, it arrives, right? I didn't actually realize it's literally connects both lakes.

[00:01:20]So, this is Michigan, isn't it? And then this is Heron. Is this Heaven?

[00:01:26]>> In fact, it's the only way to drive [music] directly from one peninsula to another.

[00:01:32]>> But that's not why it's interesting.

[00:01:35]years after it opened. This is still one of the longest suspension [music] bridges.

[00:01:40]>> Wow. I just Sorry, just I know I know I keep stopping. I know it doesn't sit well with many of you, but I just have to stop and say stuff when I see it because otherwise I forget. So, obviously it's a suspension bridge. We know that. The towers, the road deck.

[00:01:56]Nice road deck though as well. Um and it's anchored as well. So, these are the anchorage for the um for the cables. So it must be that ear down there and here.

[00:02:06]>> Nice world. And it's the longest between anchorages in the entire western hemisphere.

[00:02:13]>> It was also the first suspension bridge designed after this. The Tacoma Narrows bridge disaster which >> I've seen that one. Was that nicknamed Galloping Galloping something? I think I have seen this one.

[00:02:27]>> That the pressure was on to get this thing right. I've been wanting to make this video for years, but I've been waiting until I built up enough street cred that the Meno Bridge Authority would actually let me onto the bridge where pedestrians are almost never allowed.

[00:02:45]>> Nice.

[00:02:45]>> And y'all, that day has finally come.

[00:02:48]Now, I can't tell you about the bridge without also telling you about the Straits of Meno, because this place is cool in its own right. If you swam to the bottom of the straits, you'd see that there's a huge canyon smack dab in the middle of it. It's called the Meno Channel. It forms the foundation for the modern-day straits, and it's actually an ancient river. Back when glaciers were slowly melting out of this area some 10,000 years ago, what's now Lake Michigan was at a slightly higher water level than what's now Lake Hiron. and this river flowed east to connect them.

[00:03:27]The channel even had a 100 foot waterfall. It's now very underwater, but if it weren't, it would be one of the tallest drops in the state. Now, the sources that I read said that the Meno Channel was first described in 1938, >> which is funny to me because that date is definitely several thousand years off. The Straits have been an important travel and trading area for longer than anyone can really remember. Basically, as soon as the ice started moving out, people probably started moving in.

[00:04:01]>> Yeah, >> got to get that fresh real estate.

[00:04:03]Today, most of the native folks in this region are part of the Anisha people. In fact, many of the features in this area get their English names from the Anisha word mkino or turtle. And there's a larger story there that I'll talk about when I actually make it to Macheno Island. For now though, pro tip. If you ever come through this area, you will notice that there are two distinct spellings of Macheno. One with a C and one with a W. The difference has to do with whether the French or the British occupied that area. But >> they all come from the Anishnab language, and they're all pronounced Macheno, including the bridge. And here we'll pick up the story about a hundred years ago.

[00:04:46]>> I I just I didn't realize um actually a few of you did mention it and I didn't realize what what it referred to too much in the comments on my lakes video that Michigan Lake Michigan and Lake Heron. They're actually one lake.

[00:05:01]They're connected. The picture showed it as cuz this bridge crosses in between them. So that that's like one massive lake. It's not separated. this point, Michigan was chugging along as a state, complete with two peninsulas. Fairies carried folks across the waves. The railroad companies had their own barges.

[00:05:22]And in deep winter, you could cross on the ice. But by the 1920s, people's desire to [music] get to and from the upper peninsula was way higher than what those fairies could handle. During the summer, it wasn't rare to find a 4hour wait to cross. And during holidays and deer hunting season, some cars had to wait up to 17 hours. So within 5 years, the governor ordered a study to see if it'd be possible to build a bridge to cross this roughly four mile gap. And so began a game of red light, green light that would last for about 30 years.

[00:06:01]Thanks to fundraising failures, the Great Depression, and multiple global conflicts, it took decades to get this thing going. And along the way, people suggested all kinds of ideas about [music] what this bridge should look like, including underwater floating tunnels and a weird bridge system that hopped several islands before getting to the other side. But by 1954, they had locked in their design. They had funded the project using bonds bought by investors around the country. And finally, they were ready to go. With a budget of just under $100 million, it was time to build what was then the longest suspension bridge on Earth. And they were about to do it in the shadow of one of the most famous bridge disasters in US history. In 1940, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge had opened in Washington. And within a year, this happened.

[00:07:04]>> The failure of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge was complex and had to do with something called flutter, which ultimately caused the bridge to rock out of control.

[00:07:14]>> Basically, the problem was aerodynamic instability. In other words, the wind interacted with the bridge in just the right way.

[00:07:22]>> Yeah. is the frequency. Literally, it was so unique. I read about this years ago. Years ago, it just the frequency messed with the bridge and it just oscillated and just got worse and worse until it broke.

[00:07:38]>> Get the whole thing galloping, giving it the nickname galloping gertie. And the next suspension bridge to be designed >> was the Meno. So, the bridge designer DB Steinman got to work. And here I'll pass over the story to Matthew who today is the assistant bridge engineer for the Meno Bridge.

[00:07:58]>> Oh, sweet. I love >> Macon Bridge was the first major suspension bridge designed in the United States after the Tacoma Narrows Bridge disaster uh Gallop and Gertie. In the wake of that, the designer of the Meno Bridge, uh David Steman, actually wrote a paper about winds and suspension bridges. And in that paper he uh put forth different uh solutions to uh the problem that was uh experienced in Washington state. And that was uh an open grading bridge design to allow >> it's open. I just I literally just saw that >> Washington state and that was uh >> here I just noticed it. It's like um rebar where Okay. Okay. So, the wind obviously is allowed to go through the road deck to stop it from Right. I've never seen that on a bridge. An open grading bridge design to allow the wind to flow through the deck and also a deep stiffening truss which you can see on the outside here. And the deep stiffening trus dampens the uh harmonic uh movement of the bridge and then the grading prevents that from starting in the first place.

[00:09:13]So with this uh inside lane, the bridge is actually with a factor of safety designed to uh handle 600 mph winds.

[00:09:23]>> So you can actually be you can look down at the water driving over it. It's literally there >> before even starting to have an issue.

[00:09:33]So, David Steinman said that this was the most aerodynamically designed bridge ever.

[00:09:40]>> Steinman was actually very clear about this. In one of his papers, he repeats that at least aerodynamically, this bridge is 100% stable. Something he said no one had ever done before. the true opposite of the Tacoma Narrow's bridge.

[00:09:58]And he and his team did it just with good science and design. Because there are basically two ways you can make a bridge stable. You can reinforce it to death so it can handle any force the wind puts on it or you can just be smart about how you design it so that the wind never has a chance to apply those forces in the first place. You can work smarter, not harder. And that's what Steinman did. He took the research route, which allowed the Meno Bridge to be incredibly stable against the wind without costing millions of extra dollars in materials. Going back to those grates Matt you mentioned though, they might be wonderful for aerodynamics, but if you've ever driven over the bridge, >> you might also know that they can be a little bit unsettling. Turns out they also make a lot of work for the maintenance team. During my trip, I got to spend time not just with Matthew, but also with the maintenance supervisor and the safety boat captain. I learned not just how the bridge works, but also how they're keeping it alive almost 70 years later. And I got to ask how much more time this thing has [music] left. I learned enough to turn those conversations into a separate video. And if you want to learn more about the present and the future of the bridge, you can watch it first when it goes live on Nebula and then here on YouTube. As part of that project, I also learned why the pitch of the bridge changes as you drive over it, which totally blew my mind when it finally clicked. But for now, I want to know how they built this thing. Groundbreaking for the bridge happened in May 1954, and the first thing they needed to do was set up the pillars. Now, building pillars in more than 350 ft of water is exactly as easy as it sounds, which is to say, >> not at all. In fact, they opted to dodge that canyon entirely and put the two main pillars right on either side of it.

[00:12:03]But that's still about 200 ft underwater. So to build the peers, they used steel quesons and coffer dams. Two types of structures that were basically big steel cans. Quesons are built.

[00:12:18]>> Pull it in, pump the water out, put the concrete in, boom, you got yourself a great foundation.

[00:12:24]>> Sight and then sunk into the water and coffer dams are built right at their final destination. To sink the quesons, the engineers even designed and built a special pile driver they called the Gizmo that was strong enough to push them all the way down into the bedrock.

[00:12:40]Also, the Gizmo, excellent wrestling name. What stood out to me, though, is that once you sink a big steel can, well, now you've just got a big steel can full of water. So, how did they get that out? Turns out they often just used good old-fashioned displacement. If you've got a bucket of water and you throw some rocks into it, those rocks will kick some water out and the bucket will overflow. Keep doing that and eventually your whole bucket will just be full of rocks. It was the same idea here. They used a fairly new concrete system called prepacked where you started by filling in the can with big crushed pieces of rock dumped in off a boat. Then a liquidy mixture of cement, sand, and fly ash was pumped in at high pressure to fill up all the gaps between the pieces of rock. Prepacked worked underwater better than conventional concrete. And also, it meant that you didn't have to have huge mixers on site, which was a big deal considering they were using more than 900,000 tons of concrete for this project. I I love learning that. I didn't know that.

[00:13:54]I love that. I love that fact.

[00:13:57][laughter] Not this one, the previous one about the paw in the concrete. And oh yeah, it's amazing.

[00:14:04]>> Prepacked, they turned those quesons and coffer dams into super heavy, sturdy peers. And to stop them from getting destroyed by ice, those peers are also protected by metal plates. And they're designed to handle 20 times more ice pressure than the maximum amount test engineers ever saw in the laboratory. So you've got the peers. Next up were the main towers. And once the towers were in, it was time for the main cables.

[00:14:35]>> So the strands of wire inside the main cable are continuous across the top of the tower um and the whole length. And this that spinning operation when the bridge was constructed um took the entire summer of 1956 24 hours a day the entire summer of these uh dollies or >> there's not um safety like you wouldn't get away with what you got away with back in like you know 30s 40s and 50s compared to today. But um I I love like uh the cables in the suspens or in all bridges mainly those big fat cables that are like meter wide. They're all well not millions but tens of thousands of tiny cables that are like you know quarter of an inch across maybe or even less than that and it's just all packed together and that thing's just winding them up and down up and down up and down keeps going. ions that were laying cable along the catwalk and once they get to the anchorage, they turn around and send them back the other way. So, it's just one continuous strand of uh of cable inside the main of inside the main cable.

[00:15:49]>> So, although they look like one thick piece, each main cable is actually made of many tiny cables tightly stuck together. So tightly, in fact, that the cables are still in excellent condition almost 70 years later. So, I feel like I I came across in my reading somewhere something about the the cables are so tightly packed together that there's not even any rust on the center cable. Is that true? Am I making that up?

[00:16:16]>> No. There there are cables in comparison with a lot of suspension bridges in the world are in great condition. So when the cables were originally spun, they were coated in a red lead paste, which lead is a great substance for uh preserving uh keeping water and preventing rust. It's not so great when it comes to health uh and the health of our workers. So when we open up the main cables, there are a lot of uh safety precautions that we take and we put a zinc paste back in to preserve them as much as possible. So, all of our strands, which there are 12,580 individual strands in the main cable, >> and all those are >> 12,000 individual strands of cable in that green in in this in there, >> bound very tightly together. Um, and any little gap in between them would be taken up with that red lead paste. Now, when you look at the bridge, it's easy to think that the towers are >> I just want to stop it. I just want to say how beautiful this bridge is. Oh, my bridges video that I mentioned at the beginning. You won't be able to find it.

[00:17:27]I messed up. Um I'm new to all this and there was a bit in there that I had to kind of delete because of copyrighting and I ended up um deleting all the audio, everything.

[00:17:42]and I saved it and I couldn't get it back and I didn't have a backup on my computer. So, I had to take it down because it was just muted and I couldn't change it. So, my Bridges video, if you did see it, fantastic. If you didn't, I'm so sorry. It was a great video, but you missed out. I'm so sorry. Um, but I just want to say how beautiful um these towers are. That was my point. Um, they're so elegant. I think elegant is the right word for these towers. And you got the where the bracing is, you got a lovely design as well. Again, open for the wind to go through it. So, it is a beautiful bridge. It is actually beautiful. And like you said earlier with the deep truss box here, it just adds another element to it that you don't see on on many other bridges.

[00:18:28]>> Pieces holding everything up, but they're not. So the suspender cables are what is what transfers the load of the traffic and the dead weight of the bridge from the superructure to the main cable. From there, it's not the tower what supports the bridge, but it's the two anchorages on either side. And those are just huge monolithic pieces of concrete that are probably still curing because they're so dense and heavy. And those two uh anchorages on either side of the suspension span is what's holding up uh the cables um and taking the weight. Now obviously a small amount is supported by the tower but the pime primarily it's uh the anchorages.

[00:19:11]>> The cables are pulling on the anchorages with about 30,000 tons of force. So to stay stable and secure, the concrete alone for each anchorage weighs about five and a half times that. But nonetheless, the anchorages are still mostly hollow. I actually got to go inside one of the anchorages with Matthew. And although I wasn't allowed to film down there for security reasons, I can tell you that the cables are entering what's basically a concrete cathedral with 150 stairs down.

[00:19:47]>> That's what I wanted to see that cuz yeah, I've seen this in other bridges and it's amazing where you get all the um anchor points or the cables. It's it's it's niche but it's lovely. I I I particularly love this sort of stuff. at the bottom. It's [music] a really cool space I had never thought about. In any case, the cables are the main thing holding up the road. That meant they needed to be in place before the bridge deck because the bridge deck needed something to hang on. So, catwalks were assembled and the pictures are a little spooky. In fact, and unfortunately, two workers did fall and die during this phase of construction. To be clear, and because some people have asked, there are no bodies in the peers of the Meno Bridge. Five workers died during construction, and how each accident happened is fairly well documented.

[00:20:44]There are there are no bodies in the concrete. That said, finally, after the cables were in place, the rest of the pieces could be lifted up and secured together. [music] And in November 1957, the mighty Mac opened to China 57. Okay.

[00:21:01]57.

[00:21:01]>> Right on schedule. Building the Meno Bridge took 4,000 engineering drawings, 85,000 blueprints, millions of bolts and rivets, more than 42,000 miles of wire, and nearly a million tons [music] of concrete. The project employed about 11,000 people and last year there were more than 4 and a half million crossings. The bridge [music] is beautiful, stable, efficient, and one of Michigan's icons. But working on the bridge also isn't a project that ended in 1957.

[00:21:38]>> Almost 70 years later, there's always some kind of maintenance [music] and construction happening, plus planning for what comes next. But that is a story for the next video. Stay tuned. For now, thanks to UP Travel for supporting this video.

[00:21:56]>> Let's stop it here. Let's stop it. A lovely picture there. Um guys, if you like that and you want me to check out what she just said about the next one, please let me know because I really enjoyed this video. I'm going to do more stuff like this uh going forward. I'm going to do more stuff looking at specific landmarks, um, features, states, just just yeah, cuz I want to do stuff that I enjoy as well as mainstream stuff. Um, I think it's a very elegant bridge. I really love the color as well.

[00:22:28]So, you got the green truss deck and the green main cables and then you got the ivory color of the towers. Beautiful.

[00:22:36]Really beautiful. And I didn't know, as I mentioned at the beginning, it actually literally it's in the middle of both of the Yeah, I'm just looking at my map. So, you've got Lake Michigan and Lake Heron.

[00:22:52]Heron, and it's going to be right in the middle. So, it literally separates both of the um both of the well, two of the Great Lakes. Um guys, thank you for watching. I appreciate it. Um if you like what I'm doing, give us a like. Let me know what you think. Have you been over this bridge? And if you haven't already done so, please consider subscribing.