33rd Street Bridge

The 33rd street bridge sits atop the Dan Ryan Expressway (US 90-94), a major artery into downtown Chicago and nearby US Cellular Field (Chicago White Sox), as well as the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) Red Line rail system. Heavy traffic to and from the city made the bridge project highly susceptible to corrosion. To combat this CTA consistently specifies use hot-dip galvanizing for projects involving its elevated trains to maintain the aesthetics in and around the city of Chicago. One of the reasons HDG is so appealing to CTA is the quick turnaround time to complete projects.

For this project the material had to be available on time, as the construction of the bridge components needed to be completed in just one weekend to limit train stoppage. Any excessive downtime would have bottlenecked commuter traffic - but with the HDG this was not a problem. In all, 397 tons of steel was galvanized, including all structural members and bridge components. Because of HDG the 33rd Street Bridge will have years of maintenance free protection and corrosion and last for decades to come.