SEATTLE — The Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) is finishing its final steps before the long-anticipated opening of the West Seattle Bridge.
The SDOT is on schedule to reopen the bridge to all traffic on Sunday.
But before that, SDOT crews have been completing maintenance work and conducting tests to ensure the structure's stability.
On Tuesday, the SDOT conducted one of its final tests that include "live load testing" by driving specialized trucks over the bridge and measuring how the bridge responds.
Each truck weighs up to 80,000 pounds and about a dozen were driven across the bridge, the SDOT said. That's 960,000 pounds or 275 sedans traveling across the bridge.
"This test adds to what we know from several months of data from our intelligent monitoring system which has been continuously recording data from the bridge 24/7. The bridge has responded as predicted throughout the repair process, as well as in response to changing weather conditions from the hottest days of summer to the coldest nights this past winter without showing any cause for concern," SDOT press secretary Ethan Bergerson said in an e-mail to KING 5.
The testing follows months of repair work that includes injecting epoxy into structural cracks and applying "tensioned" cables across the bridge's structure.
The SDOT said it will take a few more days to analyze the weight load test.
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