Meanwhile, one more image from Steubenville, with maybe more to follow. Actually, this was shot from the West Virginia side of the river, at the Half Moon Industrial Park in Weirton. This is a cropped view of a photo I posted the other day.
The first series of charges that brought down the bridge ran along the bridge deck to separate it from the suspension cables. A second set of charges sliced apart the main cables that ran the length of the bridge. As the two towers fell toward shore, the West Virginia tower, here, received another set of charges to cut it into smaller pieces.
This is zoomed in and cropped from the larger image. You can still see pieces of the material that covered the explosives pre-detonation flying off the bridge.
This was the third demolition of a big bridge that I've attended. There was the Huntington 6th Street Bridge in 1995, the Shadle Bridge over the Kanawha River in the late 1990s and this one. This was the first that came off on time, by the way. In fact, I planned our daily schedule on the assumption it would run an hour or two behind, but the Ohio Department of Transportation and its demolition contractor did it at just about the scheduled time.
