Magdeburg Bridge - Germany

Water Highway

(The modern ways to control water)

The bridge “Magdeburg” (Germany) – you need to look at it a number of times to understand what is actually happening.

It’s a bridge that goes over the Elba river. It allows boats easy access into canals. It cost more than 500 million Euros and took 6 years to build... The photo was taken on the day of inauguration.

The giant kilometer long Magdeburg Water Channel-Bridge, completed in October 2003, connects two important German shipping canals over the River Elbe-Havel canal and the Mittellandkanal thats joins the former East and West Germany, as part of the unification project. It is located in the city of Magdeburg, near Berlin

Construction began in 1997 and after six years and around half a billion euros the gigantic water bridge now connects Berlin’s inland harbor with the ports along the Rhine river. As Europe’s longest water bridge it measures just short of a kilometer at 918 meters. The huge tub created to transport ships over the Elbe took 24,000 metric tons of steel and 68,000 cubic meters of concrete to build.

The water bridge will enable river barges to avoid a lengthy and sometimes unreliable passage along the Elbe. Shipping can often come to a halt on the stretch if the river's water mark falls to unacceptably low levels.

Six years, 500 million euros, 918 meters long....... now this is engineering!


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magdeburg_Water_Bridge

http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,990878,00.html