20 years of monitoring of ice action on the Confederation Bridge piers

Monitoring systems for the measurement of ice action and the observation of attendant ice conditions have been in place on several piers of the Confederation Bridge since it opened in 1997. The ice-structure interaction at two of the piers, P31 and P32 have been continuously monitored and data analyzed by the ice research group at the University of Calgary. The resulting database of ice interactions at these piers is very extensive, amounting to some 26,000 discrete interaction events, many of which have been analyzed in detail. The paper presents summaries of the results of the observations related to the interaction of the ice against the instrumented piers and summarizes the ice load and ice parameter statistics associated with the ice observations.