Niigata, Japan's Bridges: Utility Bridge across the U River

August 2007 (37.348 Degrees, 138.552 Degrees) Utility Bridge

The next bridge upstream is another utility bridge. If you look at Google Earth today you can see a bridge across the river (an extension to Highway 8) that wasn't there when I took this photo in 2007.

Note how the water line (in the photo below) is made up of segments connected with flanges that are bolted together. I'm surprised these elements didn't leak due to shaking during the Kashiwazaki earthquake. I remember going to Chiba Prefecture Department of Water after the Tohoku earthquake. We told them if they switched to HDPE pipe they would have less work and less pipe breaks after earthquakes, but they weren't interested. Maybe they didn't like the taste of water in a plastic pipe?

Niigata, Japan's Bridges: Utility Bridge across the U River by Mark Yashinsky is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.