Golden Gate Bridge Now Sings During High Winds Due to Retrofit

June 6, 2020

Golden Gate Bridge Now Sings During High Winds Due to Retrofit

The Golden Gate Bridge has started to sing. The new musical tones coming from the Bridge are a known and inevitable phenomenon that stems from our wind retrofit project during very high winds. The wind retrofit project is designed to make the Bridge more aerodynamic under high wind conditions and is necessary to ensure the safety and structural integrity of the Bridge for generations to come.

As part of the retrofit, we have been replacing handrail on the west sidewalk with new railing that has thin vertical slats designed to allow more air to flow through them (video). We knew going into the handrail replacement that the Bridge would sing during exceptionally high winds from the west, as we saw yesterday. We are pleased to see the new railing is allowing wind to flow more smoothly across the Bridge.
 
The Bridge District has been planning to do a wind retrofit for a long time. As part of the design process, the District did extensive studies of the impacts of the project, including wind tunnel testing of a scale model of the Golden Gate Bridge under high winds, mimicking the conditions we experience over the entrance to the Bay (video). These tests revealed that under certain high wind events, the Bridge would begin to hum as air passes more freely over the Bridge roadway.

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Media Contact:

Paolo Cosulich-Schwartz / Public Affairs Manager

Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District

pcosulich@goldengate.org / 415-629-9999 (text is best)