Shanghai's Bridges: Donghai Bridge (1)

The beginning of the Donghai Bridge would be barely noticeable except for the decoration placed over its approach (in this photo, the Donghai Bridge is on the right). The bridge was built to carry trucks 32.5 km to the deep water port built on Yang Shan Islands. This port can accommodate the very largest container ships and bring goods to and from China.

Most of the bridge is composed of driven and cast-in-place two-column pile shafts that support precast girder segments built in factories and carried to the bridge by barge and crane. The environment in Hangzhou Bay is extremely rough with high seas, strong winds, and the worst tidal bore in the world. The piles are embedded in very soft clay and had to be built deep under the Bay.

The bridge was constructed in 3-1/2 years (from August 2002 to December of 2005). There are two cable stayed segments to allow shipping channels under the bridge. When the bridge was completed, it was the longest bridge over open sea in the world. Now there are several longer open sea bridges, all built in China. There is a lot of information on this bridge, including several reports provided by the journal Bridge Design and Engineering.

We will take a closer look at this bridge tomorrow.

Shanghai's Bridges: Donghai Bridge (1) by Mark Yashinsky is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.