the bridge

construction

Construction of the Governor Mario M. Cuomo Bridge began in 2013 and the bridge fully opened to traffic in 2018. At the time of its construction, it was the single largest bridge project in New York’s history.

POUNDS OF AMERICAN STEEL

220 MILLION

NUMBER OF PILES

>1000

more than 300,000 cubic yards of concrete used on the project

300K

Innovative Construction Efforts

Design-builder Tappan Zee Constructors (TZC) utilized modular construction to create large sections of the bridge’s foundations, roadway and superstructure on land. This allowed TZC to safely prepare massive segments of the bridge off-site ahead of time, with some steel sections measuring up to 410 feet in length.

Over the course of construction, more than 7,000 people worked on the project, both on- and off-site, totaling more than 13 million hours. More than 300,000 cubic yards of concrete used on the project - that’s enough concrete to build a sidewalk from the bridge to Key West, Florida.

steel-reinforced concrete panels form the road deck

6000+

I Lift NY Super Crane

TZC was able to install these bridge elements thanks to its largest crane, dubbed I Lift NY. The enormous crane used a 328-foot lift arm, which is capable of raising up to 1,900 tons of material — the equivalent of 12 Statues of Liberty at once. The extraordinary lifting power of I Lift NY helped shorten construction time by months from original estimates and reduced project costs by millions of dollars. The crane also helped dismantle and recycle the old Tappan Zee Bridge.

Other innovative equipment included: TZC's mobile concrete batch plants, which supplied the majority of the structure's concrete directly on the river; self-climbing jump forms that rose along with construction efforts to create the iconic main span towers; protective bubble curtains used to absorb the energy produced during pile driving; and synchronized jacks used to lower the football-field-length foundations into the Hudson River.