The bridge most people now picture at Indian River Inlet, the one with the tall pylons and the blue cable housings, is the newest of several to cross the same water.
The bridges before
Bridges have spanned the inlet since 1934. New ones followed in 1940, 1952 and 1965, and a fifth span opened in 1976 as a twin to the 1965 bridge. The 1965 and 1976 bridges were steel girder bridges, and the inlet's current scoured around them, which is why they had to be replaced.
That is the inlet's nature. It is a channel of moving water between the Atlantic and Indian River Bay, and moving water wears away what is put in it.
The cable-stayed bridge
The current bridge is officially the Charles W. Cullen Bridge, and it is a cable-stayed design. It opened to traffic in 2012. It is about 2,600 feet long, with a 950-foot main span over the inlet. That span hangs from stay cables running to four pylons, each nearly 250 feet tall, and the cables are encased in 152 blue stay pipes, which give the bridge its color.
Putting the main span across the whole inlet is the point of the design. Earlier bridges stood in the water the current was working on. This one carries traffic over it.
A bridge that reports on itself
The less visible part of the bridge is a structural health monitoring system, installed while it was being built. University of Delaware engineers, who worked on the system, describe it as the first permanent long-term monitoring system installed during initial construction on a long-span, cable-supported bridge in the United States. Its sensors keep track of how the bridge behaves over time.
Seeing it
The bridge carries Route 1 between Dewey Beach and Bethany Beach, and the inlet below sits within Delaware Seashore State Park. Anyone driving the coast highway crosses it. The better view is from the park land on either side of the inlet, where the full line of the pylons and cables can be seen.
Sources: DelDOT's archived Indian River Inlet Bridge (Charles W. Cullen Bridge) project pages (deldot.gov) for the bridge's design, dimensions and opening; the University of Delaware Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering on the structural health monitoring system (ccee.udel.edu); the history of the earlier bridges and scour as summarized in those sources and corroborated by secondary references. Sources differ on the exact 2012 opening (January vs. May), so the story says 2012. Delaware Beach Finds did not visit for this story.