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Peeling away the myth about how the Golden Gate Bridge is painted
- schoen 5y ago> Engineers inspect areas for repainting, and then ironworkers set up the 70-by-70-feet rooms called containments to hold in the blasted sand and paint. Nothing but rainwater can fall off the bridge. How does that work? How do the containments contain the sand and paint, and where are they set up and supported?
- jaclaz 5y agoI think that they are referring to what amounts to scaffolding+shrinkwrap: https://shrinkwrapcontainments.com/image-gallery/ https://shrinkwrapcontainments.com/image-gallery/ Near the bottom of the page there are a couple photos of the Golden Gate. Most probably they have "traveling scaffolding" for the standard parts and some specific built-on-spot structures for other parts.
- Tabular-Iceberg 5y agoThis may be a good place to ask since so many people from the Bay Area hang out here. Was it ever gray, even for a short time? I know someone who adamantly claims to have driven over a gray Golden Gate Bridge back in the 70s, and being disappointed because of it. I suggested it might have been the bay bridge, but the two look pretty different, even if they had been painted in the same colour.
- vatys 5y agoI feel like I have a fuzzy early 80s childhood memory of a gray Golden Gate Bridge but I can’t be sure or prove it. Maybe it’s like a Bernstein Bears thing, where I have the same wrong memory as other people.
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- Larrikin 5y agoCan't you email the people on the official website https://www.goldengate.org/ https://www.goldengate.org/ and provide that information to the thread, as opposed to asking random strangers who could say anything?
- progers7 5y agoThere's a great children's history book titled "This Bridge Will Not Be Gray" by Dave Eggers that goes into the early days of the color choice. The bridge was shipped over from east coast metal works in orange, so it was not gray to begin with. The choice to keep it orange involved some public support so I think it is unlikely that it was ever painted gray, even temporarily.
- Tabular-Iceberg 5y agoYes, my thinking is that if it ever was gray there would have been so much outcry that it is bound to show up in search results and be mentioned by any outlines of the bridge’s history.
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- stevekemp 5y agoThere's a similar story about the Forth Bridge, in Scotland. Nowadays it doesn't need to be painted so often: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-14789036 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-147...
- LargoLasskhyfv 5y agoTBH IMO SF missed out by not using the Navy suggested wasp color scheme. This would have been so much more in line with some pieces of SciFi book covers, like from Chris Foss, f.e. Ahead of its time.