For the past 12 months, windy days in and around San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge have been characterized by a loud ‘humming’ noise.
The iconic structure started emanating the eerie hum following a $12 million retrofit of the sidewalk safety railing on the bridge’s western side. To increase the bridge’s safety against high winds and also give it a slimmer profile, engineers replaced roughly twelve thousand wide slats with narrower ones. Wind gusts whipping through the new slats are responsible for the noise, with residents as far away as across the Bay Area at Berkeley being able to hear it. Aneela Brister, resident of San Francisco, characteristically stated to The Chronicle: “It’s really loud. Huge and all-encompassing. It makes you worry if the bridge is coming apart.”
Nonetheless, a solution is coming, according to bridge spokesman Paolo Cosulich-Schwartz, even though the timeframe for that is not well defined. Engineers are working with full-size models of the bridge’s railing in a wind tunnel to optimize the noise-canceling design. The project is not finished yet, and the bridge district wants its hired engineers to get it right this time. Last time, the engineers were working with scale models.
The bridge district is always prioritizing the safety of the structure, while making the bridge quiet comes second. An iconic yet tragic example of the effect of wind loads on suspension bridges is the failure of the original Tacoma Narrows bridge south of Seattle which collapsed into Puget Sound in 1940, during a 40 mph wind event.
Golden Gate Bridge has closed due to high winds three times in the past, in 1951, 1982 and 1983, with gusts measured up to 75 mph. Bridge spokesman Paolo Cosulich-Schwartz stated that they want to be prepared for an, once-in-a-century, 100 mph wind event.Sources: San Francisco Chronicle, Fox Business
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