At the request JohnsonStreetBridge.ORG, Sharon Wood Wortman, the Portland, Oregon bridge historian, and her husband, Ed Wortman, a bridge engineer, visited Victoria to see our Johnson Street Bridge first hand. See our earlier report here for more details.
In the wake of her visit, Sharon Wood Wortman wrote a long letter to the Times-Colonist on December 7. Since the paper hasn’t published her commentary, we are publishing it here for our readers.
Sharon Wood Wortman of BridgeStories.com
Initially intended for our fourth estate, the following is Sharon Wood Wortman’s letter.
QUOTE
Dear Times Colonist Editors:
Even though I’ve lived in Portland, Oregon for more than 50 years, I’d never been to Victoria until November 26. A group that seeks to save the Johnson Street Bridge from the thermal cutting torch invited my husband, a semi-retired bridge engineer, and me, the author of The Portland Bridge Book, to Victoria. Home to 14 large bridges across water near downtown, Portland now has three large movable trusses turning 100 in the next four years.
Once we found out about the Johnson Street Bridge, designed by Joseph Strauss and an outstanding remaining example of Industrial Archeology, we couldn’t say no. Strauss, the engineer for the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, also designed the mechanical parts of Portland’s Burnside Bridge. We believed the Johnson Street Bridge to be so important that we covered all of our own expenses, lodging, transportation, food–no one paid us so much as sixpence to come to Victoria. (We were offered reimbursement for lodging, but we declined.)
Ed, with a background in historic truss bridge preservation, looked at the JSB’s condition and studied Delcan’s engineering report as well as a report titled “Heritage Assessment of the Johnson Street Bridge Victoria,” although the latter, prepared by the Commonwealth Co., was not referred to anywhere in Delcan’s report. For more about Commonwealth’s report, see Resources below.
I presented BridgeStories, my storytelling slide show, in a free event for the public at the Fernwood Inn on Sunday, Nov. 29. BridgeStories, with about 80 images, is a short course in Bridge 101, illustrating the three main bridge types (suspension, arch, beam/truss) and the three main movable bridge types (swing, vertical lift, bascule), with images of bridges from all over the world, including Canada’s Confederation Bridge (a beam).
Maybe the first bridge in the whole world was a tree. Two people needed to get across a canyon and he said, “Honey, will you cut down that tree,” thus producing a beam bridge. A truss bridge is the same as a beam bridge; only a truss has some of its steel cut away, leaving a lighter, triangle-shaped structure that costs less money to make (the lighter the bridge, the less spent on materials). As the father of one of my students once told me, “Anyone can build a bridge that will stand up, but it takes an engineer to design a bridge that will barely stand up.”
Steel truss bridges are an endangered species—rapidly disappearing from the landscape. Of the 7,000 highway bridges in Oregon, fewer than 150 steel truss bridges remain.
JSB is a truss bascule bridge of the heel trunnion variety. Bascule is a French word that means seesaw. Basically, JSB is a teeter-totter. The counterweights drop, pulling the decks up so watercraft can pass through. Some truss bridges are deck trusses–vehicles drive over the trusses, but JSB is a through truss, meaning vehicles pass through the trusses, like entering a building.
JSB and other bridges of its era were put together with rivets. It took four men to install each rivet, the heater, the catcher, the bucker-up, and the riveter. We estimate JSB might have as many as 250,000 rivets (Portland’s Hawthorne Bridge, much longer, has at least a half-million rivets). What we’re finding now is that some riveted bridges are lasting longer than some bridges put together with welds, a later technology.
Trunnion is another word for hinge. Besides its engineering pedigree, and bold blue appearance, what makes JSB unique is that it is two separate bridges with hinges located at roadway level, making JSB a heel trunnion. (Portland’s Burnside Bridge is called an underneath trunnion because its hinges are below deck.)
Between media interviews and meeting four City Councillors during our four-day visit, there was no time to be tourists–we did not visit the Empress Hotel, Legislature, or Wax Museum. We did, however, find many similarities between Victoria and Portland:
* Vibrant, high-density downtowns * both cities have experienced major inner city growth in the last few years * both are great walking cities * both are split in two by waterways * both were founded as port cities, Portland incorporated in 1851, Victoria incorporated in 1862 * both cities have had bridge disasters: in 1896, a streetcar fell through Victoria’s Point Ellice Bridge, killing 55 people; in 1893, a streetcar dove off Portland’s Hawthorne Bridge, killing seven passengers.
And both cities boast one-of-a-kind historic through-truss bridges designed by world-class engineers with open grating roadway decks that sing. We heard the JSB hit a B-flat across the harbor during one of our evening strolls!
City Councillor Chris Coleman asked Ed to comment on the Delcan report, which he has since done (e-mail of Dec. 5 attached to this email). One of the flaws of the report, as first pointed out by Vancouver, B.C. bridge engineer Michael Roberts, was the avoidance of discussion of the Johnson Street Bridge’s heritage value. Ed also comments on steel bridge design life (like the Roman aqueducts, they can “live” forever, if properly taken care of), seismic retrofit (there are options), and more.
What makes the Johnson Street Bridge a first-class candidate for rehab is that it was originally designed to carry streetcars. Multnomah County, the public agency responsible for most of Portland’s movable bridges, has recently replaced one bridge and plans to replace another. These two bridges, built in 1925 and 1950, were not designed to carry streetcars, so couldn’t stand up to contemporary traffic loads. Streetcars weighed 50 tons, about the same as today’s trucks. When I was three years old, there were about 400,000 registered vehicles in Oregon, and now there are more than four million. What we’re finding at home is that we cannot build to fit the capacity of population growth, and that it just costs too much taxpayer money to keep building new.
Waiting for the C.V. Coho in Port Angeles at the start of our Victoria visit, we found a plaque on the outside of the Marine Life Center quoting the famous Senegalese environmentalist Baba Dioum: “In the end, we will conserve what we love. We will only love what we understand. We will only understand what we are taught. Conservation through education.”
People like us–who believe that bridges tell the stories and capture our past as well as any museum–are called Pontists. We found many in Victoria. We hope more Victoria citizens take the time to educate themselves before the unique JSB pays the price of ignorance. Sometimes it takes a visitor to recognize the wonderful in another country’s front yard.
Resources:
www.johnstonstreetbridge.org - Save-the-Johnson Street Bridge site
www.johnsonstreetbridge.com/ – City’s of Victoria’s “Johnson Street Bridge Replacement Project” (no Commonwealth report here)
www.johnsonstreetbridge.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/Heritage-Assessment-of-the-Johnson-St-Bridge6.pdf - link to the Commonwealth report that concludes “The Johnson Street Bridge is a very significant heritage landmark whose characteristics illustrate many key themes in the development of Victoria.”
www.flickr.com/groups/bridges-tunnels-group/discuss/72157600006971701 – flickr’s “100 Best Bridges to See Before You Die”—JSB worthy of being on this list
www.historicbridgefoundation.com - Historic Bridge Foundation, an advocacy organization for the preservation of historic bridges
Sharon Wood Wortman
Portland, Oregon
December 7, 2009
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Yule Heibel, Mat Wright. Mat Wright said: Sharon Wood Wortman comments on our bridge http://is.gd/5uATI [...]
[...] wrote a Letter to the Times Colonist Editor outlining their visit to [...]
Social comments and analytics for this post…
This post was mentioned on Twitter by matvic: Sharon Wood Wortman comments on our bridge http://is.gd/5uATI...
[...] Wortman sent me a copy of the letter she wrote to the Times-Colonist, which we then published here on 12/20. At the time, she included a copy of an email that her husband, bridge engineer Ed Wortman, wrote [...]