The Grand Tower Pipeline Bridge is a

suspension bridge A suspension bridge is a type of bridge in which the deck (bridge), deck is hung below suspension wire rope, cables on vertical suspenders. The first modern examples of this type of bridge were built in the early 1800s. Simple suspension bridg ...

carrying a

natural gas Natural gas (also called fossil gas or simply gas) is a naturally occurring mixture of gaseous hydrocarbons consisting primarily of methane in addition to various smaller amounts of other higher alkanes. Low levels of trace gases like carbo ...

pipeline Pipeline may refer to: Electronics, computers and computing * Pipeline (computing), a chain of data-processing stages or a CPU optimization found on ** Instruction pipelining, a technique for implementing instruction-level parallelism within a s ...

across the

Mississippi River The Mississippi River is the second-longest river and chief river of the second-largest drainage system in North America, second only to the Hudson Bay drainage system. From its traditional source of Lake Itasca in northern Minnesota, it f ...

between

Wittenberg, Missouri Wittenberg is an unincorporated community in Brazeau Township in eastern Perry County, Missouri, United States. It is located on the Mississippi River, southeast of Perryville. Wittenberg is situated in the Brazeau Bottoms on Brazeau Creek opp ...

and

Grand Tower, Illinois Grand Tower is a city in Jackson County, Illinois, United States. The population was 605 at the 2010 census. The town gets its name from Tower Rock, a landmark island in the Mississippi River. History Former names of this town include ''La To ...

Construction

Although construction of a natural gas pipeline under the Mississippi River would have been cheaper, this option would have created great difficulty in handling any leaks and maintenance, so it was decided to construct a bridge to carry the gas pipeline. The bridge was the first pipeline suspension bridge to cross the Mississippi River. It was constructed for the Texas–Illinois Natural Gas Pipeline company for an estimated $3,800,000 in 1953 (equivalent to $ in ). It was the final piece in the construction of a natural gas pipeline transporting gas from

Corpus Christi, Texas Corpus Christi (; Ecclesiastical Latin: "'' Body of Christ"'') is a coastal city in the South Texas region of the U.S. state of Texas and the county seat and largest city of Nueces County, it also extends into Aransas, Kleberg, and San Patrici ...

Chicago (''City in a Garden''); I Will , image_map = , map_caption = Interactive Map of Chicago , coordinates = , coordinates_footnotes = , subdivision_type = Country , subdivision_name ...

, Illinois, and

Detroit Detroit ( , ; , ) is the largest city in the U.S. state of Michigan. It is also the largest U.S. city on the United States–Canada border, and the seat of government of Wayne County. The City of Detroit had a population of 639,111 at th ...

, Michigan, which carries of gas a day at a pressure of . Work began in September, 1953. The bridge features two steel framework towers, one on each side of the river. Vertical steel suspender cables connect the twin pipelines to the main suspension cables, at a height of above the river. During construction the pipes were stretched out across the river where welders connected them together. Each pipe weighs 5 tons and it took 72 pipes to span the river, adding to around 360 tons of dead weight. The abutments to support this weight go to the bedrock, deep on the Illinois side and on the Missouri side. The site at Grand Tower/Wittenberg was chosen because the river is narrow and deep there, and the limestone bedrock could be easily reached.

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BridgemeisterMidwest PlacesBridgehunter
* Suspension bridges in Missouri Suspension bridges in Illinois Bridges over the Mississippi River Bridges completed in 1955 Transportation buildings and structures in Jackson County, Illinois Steel bridges in the United States 1955 establishments in Illinois 1955 establishments in Missouri {{Missouri-bridge-struct-stub

Construction

See also

References

External links