China has opened the world’s longest cross-sea bridge – which stretches five miles further than the distance between Dover and Calais.
The Jiaozhou Bay bridge is
26.4 miles long and links China’s eastern port city of Qingdao to the offshore
island Huangdao.
The road bridge, which is
110ft wide and is the longest of its kind, cost nearly £1billion to build.
Chinese TV reports said the
bridge passed construction appraisals on Monday and it, along with an undersea
tunnel, would be opened for traffic today.
It took four years to build
the bridge, which is supported by more than 5,000 pillars across the bay, and
it is almost three miles longer than the previous record-holder – the Lake
Pontchartrain Causeway in Louisiana.
That structure features two
bridges running side by side and is 23.87 miles long.
The three-way Qingdao
Haiwan Bridge is 174 times longer than London’s Tower Bridge, spanning the
River Thames, but cuts only 19 miles off the drive from Qingdao to Huangdao.
Two separate groups of
workers have been building it from different ends of the structure since 2006.
After linking the two ends
of the bridge on December 22, one engineer said: ‘The computer models and
calculations are all very well but you can’t relax until the two sides are
bolted together.
Even a few centimeters out
would have been a disaster.’
The engineering feat will
only hold the record as the longest sea bridge for a few years – it will be
beaten by another Chinese bridge in the next decade.
Last December officials
announced workers had begun constructing a bridge to link southern Guangdong
province with Hong Kong and Macau.
Set to be completed in
2016, officials said the £6.5billion Bridge will span nearly 30 miles.
It will be designed to cope
with earthquakes up to magnitude 8.0, strong typhoons and the impact of a
300,000 tonne vessel.
But both structures will
still be dwarfed by the longest bridge in the world, also in China.
The Danyang-Kunshan Grand
Bridge is an astonishing 102 miles in length.
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SOURCE:247nigerianewsupdate.com/
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