 So welcome you all to Jakeway Forest. This is one of our nice, great areas in Buchanan County. We have 37 different areas that the County Conservation Board manages. And Jakeway Forest is one of our premier forests, our largest upland forest we have in the county. It also has a lot of history to it, and this bridge is going to be a great addition. It actually links up two sections of our park. The wildlife area forest is the managed forest on this side, and then on the east side we have more developed area, which includes a campground, a picnicking area, and one of the best historic sites for interpreting daily pioneer life in Buchanan County and northeast Iowa. When you're done, you're going to have the ability to walk around the grounds a bit, and a couple things that you'll notice is there's a nice lime chip trail that goes around the historic site with some really nice signs that were just completed last year. It helps tell the story of the historic site. And then the actual house is open. So if you want to walk into the house, you can take a look at the inside of the old house. We have with us also our park ranger, Mike Van Raden, who lives on site, and some other workers, Jeremy Whittle and Chris Hansen. And I see Gladys over here, who's on our Richardson-Jakeway Foundation, which is a group that fundraises for the historic site. Actually, that little history behind the historic site is that a man named Abiyathir Richardson first settled. On the other side of the river built a log cabin in 1849, but eventually built the structure that you'll see here, the old Richardson-Jakeway house in 1851. And soon after that, a town developed around here that was called Buchanan. It was also colloquially called Mudville. And one reason it was called Mudville is because a stage would come through here, and it was very muddy, and it was muddy for other reasons too. And so it got that name. The house is going to eventually have more furnishings in it. We're right now working on putting together a grand to get some actual period furniture in the house, paint some of the walls, do some wallpaper, and make it look more like a home that you would walk into in 1851 or so. If you have any other questions about the house, feel free to talk to me or Mike or Gladys as you're walking around. A couple other things I have to mention, you'll see a lot of construction going on around there. We're doing two projects right now. The old barn foundation is being worked on, and we're pouring a new cement foundation for one of the walls, and then we're right now finishing up on a new shower house project that's going to serve as a shower house and a storm shelter, have flush toilets and restrooms, and be a really important addition. Also have a dump station, so it's going to be a nice attraction out here at Jakeway Park. Again, if you have any questions afterwards, I appreciate all that you guys do in engineering and getting this bridge put together, and again, the transportation between the parts of the park here is really important to what we do, so thank you for coming. I'm Mike Farter. I'm a McKenna County supervisor, and I'd like to welcome you here on this beautiful day for ribbon cutting of a bridge. I wish I could take responsibility for this nice day, but I can't. This was truly a group effort. It took a lot of teamwork and a lot of groups to get together and put this bridge together. Everybody from individuals to groups, and a lot of different entities that went in on this. I'd like to thank everyone who had anything to do with this bridge, sincerely. It turned out a nice bridge for our area, for our citizens of McKenna County, the state, and stuff like that. I think it'll be interesting to see people from other states coming here, and other countries even, to visit this here, kind of, I don't want to say experiment, but this venture, a new venture that's only been done once before. I now would like to introduce Norm MacDonald, the director of bridges and structures from the Department of Transportation of Iowa. Well, first, I'd just like to congratulate McKenna County and all the project partners on the successful completion of this innovative bridge project. The ceremony today celebrates the third ultra-high performance concrete bridge in the country. And actually, the first ultra-high performance concrete bridge in the country was also built in Iowa. So you could say Iowa is a national leader in the area. We have Brian Moore of Guapolo County is here today with us. These types of projects give an excellent opportunity to the state DOT and our project partners in the design, fabrication, mixing, and casting of ultra-high performance concrete. The Jakeway Bridge was initiated in 2005 with a innovative bridge research and construction proposal for the design, fabrication, and testing of the bridge. The Jakeway Bridge is the first bridge to use the pie girder shape, which was developed by Federal Highway Ben Graybill. And the pie girder shape is composed of a monolithic section, which includes the deck and the supporting beams. The bridge was also nominated for an award at the Innovative Quality Initiative Workshop in Ames, which is held every two years. That workshop is to recognize outstanding high-quality bridge projects. And this bridge received the Research Merit Award. So I'd like to congratulate the partners again, and thanks for the opportunity to speak. Thanks, Norm. At this point in time, we'll turn it over to Dr. Benjamin Graybill from the Federal Highway Administration, who can give us a few words on the process and their perspective on the Federal Highway perspective on it. Thank you. I'll just say from Federal Highway's perspective that I'd like to congratulate everybody who had a part in this project. It certainly is a project of great importance to us at Federal Highway. We've been working on the use of advanced cementition materials and things like all type performance concrete, specifically for the past eight years. This is the third bridge nationwide that we have succeeded in completing. There's a number of other bridges that are in process right now. This one really is significant because it's the first time that we're using these types of advanced materials in a way that really does make the best use of their advanced properties. This is the sort of bridge, although we certainly intend to use it more widely, many more structures, larger span structures, more high-volume structures. But this is the type of structure that we see having a lot of potential for solving a lot of the problems that we have with our highway infrastructure right now in terms of being able to construct bridges more quickly and being able to construct bridges that will have significantly longer life spans. So again, I'll just congratulate everyone who's worked on this. Certainly want to thank the Iowa Department of Transportation for their willingness to be innovative and to look forward and see the potential for what we can do with these sorts of outgrowths of our research projects. So thanks. Thank you, Dr. Grebel. At this point in time, we'll turn it over to Vic Perry, who's coming in from Lafarge, our Representative Lafarge, and Vic's coming in from Calgary, Canada to talk to us on this. Thank you, Victor. Thank you, Brian. I'd like to thank everybody for showing up today. Obviously, your attendance here is very important. I'd like to recognize our dignitaries, and I'd also like to thank Brian for organizing it. I think it's a great job organizing the event, Brian. I just want to touch on three points, and I want to talk a little bit about the material briefly and a little bit of the historical perspective and touch on the significance of the project, because I think that's already been done by the previous two speakers in terms of the significance of this project, but I would further like to talk about that just briefly. Just to put the material in perspective, if you talk about normal concrete that would be in your host basement, we're talking about a concrete that has 3,000 psi or pounds per square inch compressive strength. So it's 3,000 pounds of strength on your normal host concrete basement. Now, if we go to high-performance concrete, which you'll find in the columns of high-rise buildings, that concrete is going to be in the range of 10,000 psi. So it's like 3 times stronger than your host basement concrete. The material we're standing on here, ultra-high-performance concrete, is 30,000 psi and compressive strength. So it's basically 10 times stronger than the concrete that's in your host basement, just to put it in perspective to give you an idea on the mechanical properties of this material. But it's also 5 times stronger in tension. And what that means is that when you load the bridge and it deflects, at some point you may get some cracking in the girder. You'll get some deflection. But even though it cracks, the material has the ability to withstand the cracking and carry further load beyond that cracking point. So it has what we call a ductile property. It doesn't break brittily like normal concrete will. So it has a ductile failure, which gives you early warning that the bridge may be an overload or distress situation, for example. And because this material has this ductile property, we at Lafarge branded the name of the material as ductile. So ductile comes from the ductility in the material. This material also has a very high abrasion resistance, very similar to granite. It has an impermeability lower than granite. So it is very durable in terms of withstand freezing and thawing and abrasion and various degradations that cause concrete to deteriorate over time. So we expect this material to last significantly longer. In the late 80s, there was a lot of R&D began on this material. And it was in 1997 that the very first bridge was built anywhere in the world. It was a pedestrian bridge. And in 1999, the Federal Highway became very interested in this material and started to work and develop applications in the bridge market. And as Ben Gravel mentioned previously, it has great interest in the Federal Highway in terms of going forward. Why is the Federal Highway really interested in this material? Well, normal concrete bridges deteriorate over time. You have a lot of rebar in the bridge. You get cracking from loading and fatigue. Salt eventually can ingress into the cracking, cause some corrosion in the rebar, and you get deterioration in the bridge tax. So the big advantage in using this material is to eliminate that type of deterioration and extend the life of the bridge significantly. And that means that you have lower maintenance, longer life. And due to the strength of the material, you can now start to talk about longer spans that are more slender and carry higher loads. And this bridge really demonstrates that we can build bridges with this material and demonstrates to engineers that you can use the material in a real construction and build bridges that will withstand in the future. So I would like to concur with the previous speakers and congratulate the Iowa DOT and Buchanan County on the construction of this bridge. I think it's a significant milestone in being the first bridge to have this material in the actual deck. So congratulations and thanks to everybody. At this point in time, we'll go ahead and have a ribbon cutting ceremony on it. And if everybody may as well join in and grab a hold of the ribbon as we do it. So we'll move on over there and thank you.