The 30th bridge built on the Yangtze River, China's longest river, opened for traffic Tuesday in Jingzhou city of central China's Hubei province, putting to an end to the need to ferries across the river.
The four-lane bridge links a major state highway whose north-south artery had been separated by the Yangtze. It is designed to handle up to 20,000 vehicles daily, a significant increase over the 5,000 that could previously be ferried across in one day.
The construction of the 4,397.6-meter-long bridge took four and a half years and more than 1.37 billion yuan (US$16.5 million), during which a host of technical problems had to be tackled. Some prestigious experts referred to it as a museum of bridge construction.
(People’s Daily October 2, 2002)
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