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World’s longest sea bridge takes shape

NINGBO (CHINA): Chinese engineers on Tuesday oversaw the connection of two sides of a 36-km-long bridge, the world’s longest sea crossing structure.

Workers fixed the last steel beam to the bridge spanning Hangzhou Bay, near Shanghai, linking Haiyan of Jiaxing City to Cixi of Ningbo city in Zhejiang Province.

The bridge will cut the length of the road trip from Shanghai to Ningbo by 120 km when it opens in August 2008.

The bridge, with a 32-km section spanning the sea, is a cable-stayed structure built at a cost of 11.8 billion yuan ($1.42 billion). It is designed to last 100 years. Construction of the six-lane bridge, which will have a speed limit of 100 km per hour, began in November 2003 with a percentage of its financing coming from private sources, a first for such a large Chinese infrastructure project.

Workers will finish the road paving by the end of the year. Officials welded together a final section to complete the link at a ceremony attended by several hundred workers from the various companies building the bridge.

The bridge, a mix of viaducts and cable-stayed spans to allow shipping to pass beneath, lies just south of the Yangtze River Delta, one of China’s most economically vital regions which is undergoing a massive construction boom aimed at boosting transport links. — Xinhua, AP

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