Steel Bridge Team from SD School of Mines & Technology focuses on simplicity

The School of Mines and Technology Steel Bridge team was among 14 different schools competing in the event that featured teams ranging from western South Dakota all the way down through New Mexico. The one-day steel bridge competition evaluates the students based on their bridge aesthetics, building, weighing and load testing.

The team lead for this year says that in the past, the team went above and beyond with design which did get good attention, but in reality didn't work as effectively as hoped. He says the vision for this year's bridge was all about simplicity.

"We felt that the best way to go about this bridge as opposed to other ones is keep everything as consistent as possible even if there's certain elements that in theory that you could remove or change, that makes it much more complicated to design, more complicated to fabricate and much more complicated to build and we don't want to get caught up in that, we just want to be able to put something out as quickly as possible, get practicing and just know the bridge very well," said Chad Reimer, captain of the Steel Bridge Team this year.

SDSM&T brought 12 people to the steel bridge competition this year and their ASCE as a whole brought in nearly 50 students. If the steel bridge team places high enough, they will advance on to a national competition.

Another part of the two-day conference is the Concrete Canoe Competition where students construct a canoe from scratch. They will compete with their developments from 9:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. on Saturday at Angostura Reservoir near Hot Springs.