Hoover Dam Bypass Bridge honored as most outstanding engineering achievement by ACEC

SAN FRANCISCO — T.Y. Lin International (TYLI), a full-service infrastructure consulting firm, announced that the Hoover Dam Bypass/Mike O’Callaghan-Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge Project won the prestigious Grand Conceptor Award from the American Council of Engineering Companies (ACEC) for best overall engineering achievement.

TYLI received the Grand Conceptor award, the competition’s highest honor, at ACEC’s 45th Annual Engineering Excellence Awards (EEA) Gala held on April 1, in Washington, D.C. The EEA awards is known as the “Academy Awards” of the engineering industry, recognizing engineering firms for projects that demonstrate a high degree of innovation, technical complexity, achievement, and value. The world-class Gala event includes international, federal, state, and regional officials along with members and their guests.

David Goodyear, chief bridge engineer of TYLI, led the design of the Colorado River Bridge segment of the bypass project, directing the engineering design for this North American record concrete arch across the Black Canyon. The $116 million bridge comprised a major portion of the total project cost ($240 million).

The Hoover Dam Bypass Project consists of the landmark 1,900-foot-long Colorado River crossing 1,500 feet downstream of the Hoover Dam, with 1.2 miles of approach roadway in Arizona, and 2.3 miles of roadway in Nevada. It is the highest and longest soaring concrete arch in the Western Hemisphere. Ranking as the second-highest bridge of any kind in the United States, it also features the tallest concrete segmental columns of any bridge on the planet, TYLI said.

In 2001, TYLI was honored with the task of designing this new landmark span. The full "Hoover Support Team" — a consortium of HDR, Jacobs Engineering (formerly Sverdrup), and TYLI — was selected by the Central Federal Lands Highway Division (CFLHD) of the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), in consultation with the Arizona and Nevada Departments of Transportation to provide design and construction support services for the Hoover Dam Bypass Project.

The Hoover Dam Bypass is one of three TYLI projects to receive ACEC national awards, along with the new I-64 Kanawha River Bridge in West Virginia, and the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge East Tie-In structure.

For more information, visit www.hooverdambypass.org.