Guizhou province, in southwest China, one of the country's least developed areas, suffers from its many mountains which are a barrier to transportation development, but fortunately they have proven to be the perfect place to tryout some eye-catching bridges it has built over the past 10 years.
 |
|
Balinghe, Guizhou province, China's longest steel truss girder suspension bridge. [Photo/ gog.cn] |
In doing this, it has spent tremendously on construction – from 350,000 yuan ($54,000) 10 years ago to 380 million yuan now -- placing more importance on expressways, waterways and state and provincial roads.
The deputy director general of the provincial transportation department, Luo Qiang, adds, "A number of these technologies have filled in some engineering blanks," and, in the process, have brought more than 200 patents from these mammoth engineering projects done in cooperation with several dozen research institutions and universities.
 |
|
Qingshuihe, the world's longest mountain steel girder suspension bridge, in Guizhou province. [Photo/gog.cn] |
One result is the Balinghe Bridge, completed in 2009, a key part of the highway connecting Guizhou and Yunnan province, and China's longest steel truss suspension bridge, and the sixth in the world, while the recently completed Qingshuihe extra long bridge is the longest steel girder suspension bridge in the mountains.
According to Luo, to build the bridges and highways, the province needed tunnel gas technology to deal with the buildup of poisonous gas in the tunnels, and crushed local sand instead of common sand from other provinces to cut costs, and the resulting technology can be applied to mountainous areas in Yunnan, Sichuan, and Hunan province and the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region.
There was a bridge conference this past October in Guizhou, where academics and experts in bridge construction gave the thumbs-up to Guizhou for its achievements and it has allowed the province to connect all counties with expressways for the first time.
