Photo courtesy Ministry of Transportation of Ontario

Thunder Bay, Ont.'s Hawk Lake Bridge was one of PCA's 12^th Biennial Bridge Awards Competition winners.

An Ontario bridge was chosen among seven winners in the Portland Cement Association's (PCA's) 12^th Biennial Bridge Awards Competition.

Hawk Lake Bridge (Thunder Bay, Ont.) was built with ultra high-performance concrete (UHPC) in joints between girders, in the approach slabs, and in the precast guardrail curbs. Glass fibre-reinforced polymer (GFRP) reinforcing bars were used to speed up construction. The bridge was the first to incorporate UHPC batched in a ready-mix concrete truck and cured in the field at low temperatures. The single-span, 27-m (89-ft) long, 14-m (45-ft) wide structure was designed and built by the Ministry of Transportation of Ontario (MTO), TPT Engineering, Carillion Canada, and Lafarge North America.

PCA's 2010 bridge awards program attracted 38 entries from across Canada and the United States, and covered a variety of structure types and construction methods. The winning projects were selected based on creativity, functionality, esthetics, sustainability, and economy in design and construction.

Winners were recognized at the 2010 Concrete Bridge Conference in Phoenix, Ariz., last month.