Actually, it’s a little ahead of schedule -- with a planned completion date in early November, at least a month earlier than the original December grand opening.
The bridge proper is, except for clean-up work, completed. However, providing access to the bridge will take another three months. In order to eliminate the switchbacks and hairpin turns along US93 on either side of Hoover Dam, five miles of new roadway are under construction.
Recently, a $7 million contract was awarded to Frehner Construction Company of North Las Vegas to complete the access highway: paving the road; providing signage, lane striping, the median barrier, and lighting; tying in the new road to US93; and parking-area improvements for the visitor and pedestrian plaza of the new bridge.
Once that work is completed, traffic will be allowed to move across the $240 million Mike O’Callaghan-Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge and Bypass for the first time, and the roadway across Hoover Dam itself will be closed, once and for all, to through traffic. The bypass will eliminate nearly an hour of driving between Las Vegas and Kingman, Arizona.
The bridge’s total length is 1,900 feet, a little more than a third of a mile. Its height of 890 feet qualifies it as the nation’s second highest bridge (the first is the Royal Gorge Bridge in Canon City, Colorado, at 955 feet) and, according to the website highestbridges.com, the 14th highest in the world. The highest is the Siduhe River Bridge, near Yesanguan in Hubei Province in China, at 1,550 feet.
