Inspection and Rating of the Platte River Bridge in Denver

The Platte River Bridge, opened in 2004, is a cable-stayed pedestrian bridge, crossing the South Platte River between Commons Park and Commons West Apartments on the 16th street in Denver. Cable-stayed pedestrian bridges, like all bridges, must be inspected and maintained to limit the threat to life and safety. This paper presents a practical and stepwise approach for evaluating the health condition of this type of bridges, incorporating visual inspection, dynamic investigation, and structural reliability assessment. This approach is adopted to inspect and rate the Platte River Bridge. The visual inspection only finds the minor distresses and reveals that the bridge is in a good condition, but the dynamic investigation indicates excessive global vibration of the bridge. Fatigue cracking of the cables and cable connection welding are identified as the governing failure modes. The fatigue reliability assessment is recommended to be performed along with cyclic loading estimation, in order to assess the possible remaining service life.