Mercer Island Bridge

Coordinates: 47 ° 35 ′ 23 "  N , 122 ° 16 ′ 6"  W.

Mercer Island Bridge
Looking east towards Mercer Island , right the Lacey V. Murrow Memorial Bridge , left the Homer M. Hadley Memorial Bridge
Official name	Lacey V. Murrow Memorial Bridge and Homer M. Hadley Memorial Bridge
use	Interstate 90
Crossing of	Lake Washington
place	Seattle , Washington
Entertained by	Washington State Department of Transportation
construction	Pontoon bridge
overall length	Lacey V. Murrow Memorial Bridge: 2019 m Homer M. Hadley Memorial Bridge: 1772 m
opening	2nd July 1940
location

The Mercer Island Bridge is a highway bridge in the US state of Washington , which leads Interstate 90 from Seattle over Lake Washington to Mercer Island . It is formed by the two parallel floating bridges, Lacey V. Murrow Memorial Bridge and Homer M. Hadley Memorial Bridge .

history

Lake Washington, with an average depth of 30 m, is unsuitable for building bridges with piers, which is why the engineer Homer Hadley proposed the construction of a floating bridge over the lake in order to better develop the summer resort of Mercer Island in the 1920s . The project was endorsed by Lacey V. Murrow , then chairman of the Washington Roads Department and implemented with government funds made available during the Great Depression . Thus the first bridge over Lake Washington could be opened in 1940. This bridge, known as the Lake Washington Floating Bridge , was then the longest pontoon bridge in the world. Its length was only exceeded in 1963 by the Evergreen Point Floating Bridge a few kilometers to the north . In 1967 the structure was renamed the Lacey V. Murrow Memorial Bridge . Since the bridge could no longer cope with the increased volume of traffic, the Homer M. Hadley Memorial Bridge, which opened in 1989, was built immediately north of the existing structure. During the subsequent renovation work on the Lacey V. Murrow Memorial Bridge, it was badly damaged by unsuitable procedures and partially sank into the lake, so that it had to be replaced by a new structure.

Web links

Commons : Interstate 90 Lake Washington bridges  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Webcam and weather information
• Lacey V. Murrow Memorial Bridge. Seattle-Mercer Island, Washington. Historical background. (PDF; 549 kB) Retrieved November 16, 2013 (English). 

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Lake Washington Floating Bridge is dedicated on July 2, 1940. HistoryLink.org, January 14, 1999, accessed June 29, 2016 .