Thread: What a Bridge!

Originally Posted by

He was kidding wasn't he?

Sadly, NO. :eek:

(We moved back to the Qld side of the border shortly afterwards in case it was something in the water.)

P

I had to read a few times to make sure I wasn't missing something, ROFLMAO
Back to the series on the ABC recently, wasn't that engineering feats of the 19th century?
I know that there was nothing recent

The Italians are planning to build a bridge across The Strait of Messina which divides the island of Sicily from Calabria in southern Italy, that is 2 miles (3km) wide.

The bridge will be 60 m (196 feet wide) and will have 12 lanes for traffic and two lanes in the middle for trains. This will allow 140,000 vehicles and 200 trains per day. This will cut down transit times of up to 12 hours down to minutes.

This project if completed would stand as one of the Landmark Bridges of the 21st century. It would be the longest suspension bridge ever built (between towers). Construction is to start by the end of 2005.

Strait of Messina Bridge Project

Some details:
Length of center span: 10,827 feet
Length of each side span: 600 feet
Total length of suspended deck: 12,028 feet
Width of suspended deck: 197 feet
Height of towers: 1,255 feet

Other record suspension bridges (ranked by length of bridge’s center span):
Bridge/Country/Center span
Akashi Kaikyo/Japan/6,532 feet
Great Bealt/Denmark/5,328 feet
Humber/Great Britain/4,626 feet
Jiangyn/China/4,544 feet

There is a good book out called "why buildings fall down - Matthys levy & Mario Salvadori" , its by two very eminent engineers and it is almost a text book really but is interesting reading.

Some serious stuff up's and lessons have been learned, thats for sure.

My favourite is the story of El Zocalo in Mexico were they built the theatre and art museum next to an older part of the city built in the 1500's, it was built on the same level between 1900 and 1934. when visited in the 1940's it had sunk to 1.8 metres below the level of the older building and you had to decend a staircase to get to it.

this was apparantly due to the weight of the theatre pushing water out of the ground below, the older structure was apparently built on rock and the new on the sandy clay sub soil.

in the 1960's if you visited again you had to climb a staircase 1.8 metres from the old building to the theater, this was due to a number of tall buildings being constructed in the area in the interviewing 20 years which had pushed the water out from under their foundations and back under the theatre.

Because of the soil type the buildings were apparently totally undamaged. Don?t know what there situation is today.

Cheers

Dave

If any of you are into kayaking in Victoria you're probably familiar with the dam on the Mitchell river that now consists if large stone blocks spread about half a Km down the river, and two abutments. Apparently it failed in the first flood after it was built.

If anyone has a photo of it could you please contact me or post here, as I'd like to use it in some course notes I'm writing (with acknowledgement of course). I had some photos, but can't find them now.

Not sure what pictures you are after exactly but a Google image search using 'mitchell river' and 'mitchell river dam' brought up a couple of pictures

Unfortunately doesn't seem to have the one I want - I'll do a more detailed search later. Thanks Oges.