Nuts & Bolts n. pl. slang - 1. Detailed practical information about how something works or can be accomplished.

If designed to take advantage of today’s technology, a new Boardwalk will last considerably longer than the current Boardwalk has and we will have to live with the design choices we make for a long time to come. The purpose of the Boardwalk Sample Area is to provide the Ocean City community with a state-of-the-art platform where various materials, products, and design options can be experienced and compared first hand by the public. In this way the citizens of Ocean City will not have to rely on the guesses or tastes of someone unfamiliar with the Ocean City experience when planning for the inevitable replacement of our Boardwalk begins.

Planning for this Boardwalk Sample Area has already begun and going forward will be influenced by community involvement . Preliminary conceptual plans created for Ocean City by the HC Bridge Company and Harbor Technologies have been adopted for our stand-alone module and will be modified to reflect that community input. Duffield Associates, an award-winning tri-state geoscience consulting firm, will be providing both geotechnical and civil engineering as well as environmental permitting assistance to our professional team. Vendors and their products are being sorted through by a growing list of individuals and companies who have offered their assistance as technical advisors in their respective areas of expertise.

To the right are six categories of Boardwalk design options currently under consideration. Some of the options will be governed by regulations, building codes, or common sense. For example, recent AASHTO LRFD Guide Specifications for Pedestrian Bridges require that pedestrian bridges over 10′ in width – which is what the Boardwalk is – also be designed to support an H10 Design Vehicle. Subsequently, at a minimum, a new Boardwalk has to be designed to support a 20,000 lbs vehicle and a uniform pedestrian load of 90 lbs/sqft both with an adequate margin of safety.

How much extra weight capacity above that minimum we might choose to allow for future traffic loads will be up to the Boardwalk community. And with input from city leaders and the public we can answer that question and populate those categories and elements not controlled by safety codes with actual products and materials, and then narrow down the those design choices to a handful of popular “finalists” to be incorporated into the actual Sample Area when construction begins.