Marathon Span: World's Longest Sea Bridge Opens

The photo caption that says the concrete used is enough to fill 3800 Olympic sized swimming pools is incorrect--the correct number is closer to 1000.

From the body of the article, they used 81 million cu.ft. of concrete. An olympic sized swimming pool has a minimum volume of 88,000 cu.ft. That works out to more like 920 Olympic sized pools.

Hey, the web reporter got the correct order of magnitude for their analysis. That's better arithmetics than many Physicists get prior to peer review.

;-)

BTW, I should note that I did not check all the numbers in the article--the statistic on concrete (in terms of swimming pools) caught my eye, it didn't seem like enough concrete, but I guess it must have been enough.

(I was thinking of massive underwater concrete structures, ...)

You know if you do the math on the size of this the volume does seem a little light. I could easily see about 2/3rds of that in the deck and rails alone. Pretty impressive if they built it that lean. Do you suppose they stretched it out with that curve so they could hold their own unique marathon on it. They are definitely achievement oriented. ( and that's not all bad either)

No idea--it seemed light to me, also, but I'm an EE. ;-)

The structural engineer I studied under in school said for structural engineering you live by three esses. Stability, safety, and serviceability. He said the stability and safety of a structure are more hard science oriented, but the serviceability of a structure is more an art.

He had us imagine working through the equations to design a second floor slab, except made out of rubber. If we designed only with adequate safety factors and stability (ignoring serviceability), the floor section could be made fairly thin. The result? A floor with a large enough deflection and spongy feeling that no one would want to walk on it, let alone trust to put their desks, chairs, etc. on it.

I'm not a structural guy, but perhaps they reduced the serviceability of the bridge in order to save on materials... any structural guys/gals out there care to opine??

I don't believe the parts about resistance to earthquakes and 300,000-ton ships.

Depends on if the ship is doing 1 knot or 20 I guess.

I expect many records to be broken by China in the next 100 years, we are too slow and too skint do do anything on the scale that they do for the general public?

Spencer.

Oh, we have the Chinese beat. Heck, why right here in Maryland we are building a section of highway that is called the Inter-County Connector (ICC) that will cost $2.5 BILLION for a piece of road that is only 20 miles long, over land no less. Clearly we can waste way more money than they can any day.

Yeah... we do a good job, that's for sure. Right now there is a hot debate about a new I-5 Interstate bridge between Oregon and Washington...

A replacement I-5 bridge over the river is proposed that is estimated to cost $3.6 to $8.7 billion. The bridge is 3,538 feet (1,078 m) long with a main span of 531 feet (162 m).

That's a cost of a minimum of $1,017,524 per FOOT!

I Simply don't understand how any bridge, no matter how magnificent, could possibly cost 1 to 2.5 Million dollars PER FOOT.

Is that out of the ball park or what? This new Chinese bridge really puts things in perspective.