The Hoover Dam bypass bridge is being built about a half-mile downriver from the dam across Black Canyon. When completed, it will be 1,900 feet long with a 1,080-foot main span. The four-lane bridge (US93), 840 feet above the river, will be the first concrete-steel-composite arch bridge ever built in the U.S.
In the late afternoon of Friday Sept. 15, 2006, high winds snapped a 2,500-foot-long pulley-type "high-line crane" system that spanned Black Canyon and was used to transport heavy materials for the building of the bridge below. The snapped cable, in turn, toppled the two 300-foot-tall towers on both sides of the canyon that held up the cable.
Luckily, the reported 100-mile-an-hour winds that swept down the canyon that day had stopped work on the project, so only a skeleton crew of construction workers was on the site and no one was injured in the mishap.
When the accident occurred, the bypass project was about halfway completed and well on its way toward its scheduled 2008 grand opening. The accident, however, has delayed the project.
The replacement high-line crane system is expected to be operational in late 2007. A revised schedule for completion of the bypass is still being finalized, but at this time, the delay has been estimated to be about two years. That would put the opening in mid- to late 2010.
By the way, the actual bridge portion of the Hoover Dam Bypass Project has been named the "Mike O'Callaghan-Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge." O'Callaghan, a decorated Korean War veteran, was governor of Nevada from 1971 to 1979 and the long-time executive editor of the Las Vegas Sun.; he died in 2004. Tillman was an Arizona State University and Arizona Cardinals football player who turned his back on a multi-million-dollar NFL career when he enlisted in the U.S. Army; he was killed in Afghanistan in 2004 at the age of 27.
