Cornell CEE Class of '23 Ensures that Flat Rock Suspension Bridge Lives On

So excited that the sixty-meter Flat Rock Suspension Bridge in Ithaca, New York - which we designed and built forty years ago as undergraduate engineering students - has been re-designed by the next generation of Cornell engineering students using modern materials. See today's Cornell article.

Hats off to the Civil and Environmental Engineering Class of '23, Carpenters Local 277, and Charles Trautmann, PhD '83; were it not for them, this re-engineering would have never happened.

Year-1983 and later photos of the original bridge can be found here - see if you can find the one where we are conforming to Cornell Facility's requirement that "all must wear hardhats and boots." Also in there are pictures of grad students that helped computer-model the live and dead load of the bridge, using some of the first desktop computers with structural engineering codes. Graphical output from our initial calculations showed vertical deflection of the decking to be approximately one mile; it taught us that to use "small deflection" codes, we needed to incrementally add the load and allow the suspension bridge to incrementally modify its shape to accommodate the additional load.

The 1983 cast of Cornell characters included: Tony Ingraffea, Tom O'Rourke, and Kenneth Hover; students Ellen (Birkhimer) Brenden, Jeff Burrow, my buddy Bryan Clark, Rick Crum, Clark Defranceaux, Robin (Ackerman) Foley, Clinton Glass, Tom Keane, Doug Neal, Tom Reilly, Mark Ritter, Paul Tomiczek, Susan (Hentschel Tully), and Dave Worsley. (Who did we forget?).

Forty years later, many aspects of the bridge experience come full circle. In 1983, Drs. Tony, Tom, and Kenneth were early in their professional careers; circa this year they are retired or retiring. Tony's son, a graduate of Cornell and a practicing Professional Engineer, was involved in the bridge re-design. Dr. Charlie himself was a Cornell CEE PhD student at the time we built the bridge, and since then has lived close to the bridge. In 1983 we thought (knew!) we were the coolest engineering students ever, but Bryan Clark and I took time to travel to Cornell last fall and meet the Class of '23, and we now know that are there are no better CEE students (ever!) than Bo Rider, Angela Melugin, and the rest of the Class of '23.

The bridge is now forty, and it has at least another 40 years in it with these new materials; it will now officially outlive the Class of '83 characters.

As part of our Forty-Year Class Reunion, there will be a Dedication of the Bridge on June 10th, 2:30 p.m., at the bridge.