Quote:
MILLAU, France (AP) – Piercing the sky above the verdant hills of southern France, a stunningly modern roadway bridge hailed as the tallest in the world was officially inaugurated Tuesday.
Celebrated as a work of art and an object of French national pride, the Millau bridge will enable motorists to take a drive through the sky – 270 meters (891 feet) above the Tarn valley for a 2.5 kilometer (1.6 mile) stretch through France’s Massif Central mountains.
Designed by British architect Norman Foster, the steel-and-concrete bridge with its streamlined diagonal suspension cables rests on seven pillars – the tallest measuring 340 meters (1,122 feet), making it 16 meters (53 feet) taller than the Eiffel Tower.
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and
Quote:
The €400m (£276m) bridge is balanced on seven pillars, each topped by a pylon from which descend the cables that stay the roadway. At 343m high, the top pylon is 20 metres higher than the Eiffel tower.
Sensors have been built into 36,000 tonnes of steel and 206,000 tonnes of concrete to record stresses from the forecast 28,000 vehicles a day in summer and from climatic variations.
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And just to stir the post a bit
Quote:
From an Americans perspective few realize that the greatest civil engineers in the word are the French. They have huge sewers under Paris that have been there forever. The roads in France are like silk and with no potholes. They make fast trains and if you ask any American civil engineer, the French build bridges that are decades ahead of the rest of the world. It was the French engineers behind that 150 MPH Acela Amtrak train running between Boston and D.C. incidentally.
But it’s this bridge in Millau that gets me. Built in conjunction with British architect Norman Foster this bridge was designed and completed for less than 400 million Euros or about $600 million at today’s rate (it would have been $350 million before Bush got hold of the economy). But even at $600 million this is peanuts compared to what Californians are being charged for little more than a new onramp to replace the Oakland span of the SF Bay Bridge (to be renamed the Norton Bridge). This simple Oakland project (by comparison to the Millau) is bumping $2 billion and could go higher. Why don’t we bring in the French to do the bridge? Californians, as sharp as they all consider themselves, are exploited by the corruptions of the Democrat run government on a daily basis. This new French bridge makes a mockery out of the rip-off taking place in the SF Bay Area. Laughable.
REF: http://www.dvorak.org/blog/index.php?p=961
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BBC slide-show of the bridge:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_pictures/4095037.stm
Mr Mephisto
PS - If you don't know where the Massif Central is, it's a mountain range in the centre of France, south of Paris.