India's Bridges: Highway 4 Culvert Bridge near Lodai, Gujarat (3)

February 2001( 23.3893 Degrees, 69.7708 Degrees) Highway 4 Culvert Bridge near Lodai, Gujarat, India

The height of the headwall may be designed to provide enough head to clean the culvert of debris during storms. Since concrete is expensive and labor is cheap, many of these walls are built of stone by skilled masons with pointed mortar joints. 

I've forgotten what the arrows and numbers painted on the sides of the walls facing oncoming traffic signify. Nicely paved roads like Route 4 are maintained by the Gujarat State Roads and Buildings Department. 

We were in India (as usual) to study the damage a large earthquake had caused to infrastructure. We were impressed at the efficiency with which the road department repaired roads and bridges and removed all the earthquake damage that was placed along the roads. The Japan Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, and Transportation had the same responsibility after the recent Tohoku Earthquake.

India's Bridges: Highway 4 Culvert Bridge near Lodai, Gujarat (3) by Mark Yashinsky is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.