Nearly 60 years of exposure to the elements can pose quite a corrosive threat to a bridge’s structural integrity.

Concerns over the deteriorating paint system, ongoing corrosion of the carbon steel, pooling water, suspect rivets, and a need to boost capacity prompted owner KiwiRail to seek out solutions to keep the viaduct operational heading into its second century.

With motorists above, a girder of the then 28-year-old bridge in Milwaukee, Wis., started to crack and sag. Although no injuries occurred, the steel arch bridge was closed immediately and repairs started soon after.

Before Pappas started the job, he scoped out the scene and found that the bridge was in very bad shape. It was so rusted that the steel had become compromised. “It had very deteriorated steel; we had to replace and strengthen and stiffen the steel after we blasted it,” he said.

The time-saving, product-conserving, environmentally friendly machine is pushed around, fed all sorts of coating materials, and expected to do it all over again the next day.

You can’t often bridge the gap between the past and present as directly as Thomas Industrial Coatings is on the 139-year-old Eads Bridge rehabilitation. By using the TruQC application (or app), they’re connecting the bridge’s history with the app’s innovation. For this project, highlighted in “The Mighty Mississippi: Coating Crew Saves River’s First Bridge” (CoatingsPro, May 2013), the coatings crew is maintaining quality control over the daily hazard analysis, weekly environmental report, toolbox talk, incident report, and timesheet submission.

Until recently, The Lucius J. Kellam Jr. Bridge-Tunnel, more popularly known as the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel was also known as one of the “Seven Engineering Wonders of the Modern World,” joining the Golden Gate Bridge and the Panama Canal on the list of structural marvels. Although the “aging technology” has been replaced on the official list, the achievement behind it remains impressive: the location, daunting. This fact became immediately apparent to the coatings crew charged with repairing and recoating the bridge’s 54" (137.16cm) concrete piles after they were badly damaged by a run-away barge.