In article , "Kevin Brooks"
wrote:

"Paul F Austin" wrote in message
. ..

"Chad Irby" wrote
"Kevin Brooks" wrote:

When we were taught bridge demo, the large suspension bridge was
not
even really addressed (I can recall an instructor flippantly
remarking that it would probably be best to just park a couple of
fuel trucks under the cable at its lowest point and light them off
and hope that the thermal loading degraded the strength enough to
drop it).

One of those "how to knock down buildings" shows on Discovery showed
a
medium-sized suspension bridge somewhere getting knocked down, and
they
didn't screw with the main cables for the primary cuts. They just
knocked down the vertical suspending cables with a *lot* of much
smaller
charges, taking out the deck. I suppose they went back later and cut
the big cables, but if you don't have something to drive on, it's not
that useful, especially in the short term.

Now, if you had some good prep time, a half-ton chunk of thermite
wrapped around the cable could be interesting...

I would think the anchors at the ends of the suspension cables would be
a
fruitful place to start but somehow I don't think the Golden Gate's
anchors
have prebuilt demo chambers.

You'd probably need some pretty massive prechambers. The weight for each
anchor on the Golden Gate is a whopping 60 thousand tons. Which would be
equivalent to a solid cube with sides a bit over 30 yards long. Buried.
Merely busting up that reinforced concrete behemoth does not guarantee
success, either, as long as the bulk of the mass remains in place and the
reinforcing steel continues to distribute the load throughout the bulk.

Hmmmm...it's California, after all. I wonder if a sufficient number of
troops indulging in California's most valuable agricultural crop could
get into a mindspace to levitate it?