Tampico Bridge

Tampico Bridge
Tampico Bridge
	Bridge and Pánuco River
Coordinates	22°13′42″N 97°50′13″W / 22.22833°N 97.83694°W
Carries	Mexican Federal Highway 180
Crosses	Pánuco River
Locale	Tampico, Tamaulipas &; Pueblo Viejo Municipality, Veracruz,; Mexico
Official name	Puente Tampico
Maintained by	Caminos y Puentes Federales
Characteristics
Design	Cable-stayed bridge
Total length	1,543 m (5062 ft)
Width	18 m (59 ft)
Height	55 m (180 ft)
Longest span	360 m (1181 ft)
History
Opened	October 17, 1988
Statistics
Toll	32 pesos
Location

The Tampico Bridge (Spanish: Puente Tampico) is a vehicular cable-stayed bridge connecting the Mexican states of Tamaulipas and Veracruz in eastern Mexico.

Geography

The bridge crosses the Pánuco River near the coast of the Gulf of Mexico.

It connects the city of Tampico in Tamaulipas and Pueblo Viejo Municipality in Veracruz.

Design and engineering

The bridge has been in service since 1988 and was designed by Professor Modesto Armijo from COMEC, a Mexican engineering company. It was designed to withstand the severe Atlantic hurricanes from the Gulf of Mexico.

The bridge uses an orthotropic steel deck girder for a central section of the 360 metres (1,180 ft) long main span, while the rest of the main span and the short lateral spans are a prestressed concrete girder. Both steel and concrete deck girders have the same external shape. This original design principle was later used for the 756-metre (2,480 ft) main span of the Pont de Normandie, a cable-stayed bridge in Normandy, France.

The dynamic analysis of the bridge under turbulent cyclonic winds, as well as the revision of the structural project, and the geometry plus stress control of the bridge during erection, were achieved by Alain Chauvin from Sogelerg, using the French "Scanner" computer program.