Cooper River Bridge

Seismic Evaluation

The Cooper River Bridge in Charleston, South Carolina is a replacement of two smaller truss bridges over the Cooper River to provide access between Charleston on the north and Mount Pleasant on the south.  The new bridge carries eight lanes of traffic and a 12-foot-wide walkway/bikeway.  The main span is 1,546 feet with an overall structure length of approximately 3 miles.  In addition to the river crossing, there is a smaller crossing over Town Creek providing a 300-foot-wide navigation channel.  

SC Solutions' scope for this project included the following activities:

• Development of the modeling methodology and analysis of the global bridge model,
• Investigation of tower behavior under various service and accident loads,
• Nonlinear seismic analysis of the new Cooper River Bridge Main Span structure and its high level approaches.