By July 3, the last of the plates at the fracture location had been bolted into place. But there was still one more important step to complete before the bridge could be declared fully restored. During the initial condition inspection, HNTB conducted non-destructive phased array ultrasonic testing on the tie girders’ 500 welds to determine if similar cracks were forming or could form under certain conditions. Seventeen welds were found to have anomalies, which Kiewit plated over the next three weeks with a total of 78,000 lb of steel to provide additional redundancy. Another 29 weld defects were ground or cored out.
that's a lot of steel used to fix it.
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