The Chesapeake Tunnel Bay Bridges This video was another fascinating journey back in time. The Chesapeake Bay’s southern end which is about 17 mile wide separates the Delmarva Peninsula and a small portion of Virginia from its greater portion to the south, the main-land state of Virginia; or more specifically, the Cities of Norfolk and Virginia Beach. This was also a very heavily travelled sea route. Before the bridge was built, ferries carried travelers across the mouth of the bay to visit the northern sunny beaches of Delaware and Eastern Maryland. This would also be the route to take for travelers wishing to go north who had to otherwise travel a great many miles and hours west and inland in order to cross the Potomac near Washington DC…show more content… It began with long bridge sections that were carefully placed inline using 2 mile towers built for guidance and then four large stone and sand islands built where the tunnels would surface. Tunnels were decided upon since the Navy especially didn’t want a bridge to become a casualty or hindrance from possible enemy attacks in the future. This was an important deciding factor since the largest Navy base on the East coast was there in the bay at Norfolk. Therefore two large sections of ocean would be left un-obstructed. The construction used many impressive innovations that were built just for this specific project. There was a giant concrete pillar factory on the Virginia shore, giant barges with long feet that reached the cay floor, and long bridge crawlers that moved along the placed footers. It was yet another impressive Chesapeake feat. Only one big negative event occurred that would slow up work for a few days, and that was the great nor-Easter of 1962 also known as the Ash Wednesday Storm. This storm was near as strong as a hurricane, and the waves it produced did the most destruction. It ruined the first of the big barges and moved some of the first tunnel sections that were placed at the island. The day after, engineers had their work cut out for them. But they quickly adapted and overcame. American ingenuity would not be checked by…show more content… Also, as with the northern bridge, planners would hire the same company to complete the second project. But a neat thing occurred in this project. Sverdrup Engineering was ran by Mr. Sverdrup during the previous construction, and now, 10 years later, the company was run by Sverdrup’s son. So the second bridge would be built by alongside what his father had completed over a decade before; a truly father-son project. This project would use satellite technology to do what the previous generation had done with line-of-site and 2 mile placed sea towers. And the only major dilemma this second span would face would be the January 22nd Freighter ship crashing. The ship was driven by the wind into a section of bridge knocking it completely off the pylons. This dilemma took 42 days to fix. This project would take 46 months because along with building the twin span would also be completed the retrofitting of the old bridge and tunnels. Another excellent use of innovation and technology would be the building of special tunnel cleaning trucks to refinish and polish the tunnel walls as they collected copious amounts of soot from the vehicle traffic over the years. This same cleaning apparatus would be copied and used in tunnels all over the world in coming