It took a year to build the Empire State Building, and 5 years to build the Hoover Dam yet current estimates for the Francis Scott Key bridge rebuild are near 10 years. Why is this? Have we regressed?
In: Engineering
It depends, it doesn’t really take that much longer to build a building. Empire State Building took a little over a year, and it was record breaking fast at the time. Chrysler building was a little closer to a year and a half. They also had many people die on them from lax safety standards.
Newer buildings in NYC seem to do 4-5 years, for much bigger buildings.
Things like the Hoover Dam and the FSK bridge, well again, I don’t know that they take longer to build. The engineering before you start however is a lot more involved, as environmental studies are needed now, and construction might require environmental mitigations.
For the FSK bridge replacement, they are saying 10 years because you have to start the engineering. The Hoover Dam started in 1922 if you start from when they thought about building it. So 14 years. The FSK bridge started sometime in the 60s, with actual funding being 1968, so 9 years (and that was likely after engineering effort started)
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