Made in China: Yangtze River bridge a testament to quality construction

The Wuhan Yangtze River Bridge has gone through seven major floods, 77 hits from cruise ships, and six decades worth of wear and tear. It still stands firm in central China’s Hubei Province today.

An inspection report by authorities in the city of Wuhan showed on paper what people can see in real life: The bridge shows no indication of sinking or morphing. Its eight piers do not have any cracks, and all can bear up to 60,000 tons of pressure and flood waters with a volume of 100,000 cubic meters at a velocity of five meters per second.

The Wuhan Bridge is also capable of withstanding magnitude-8 earthquakes, the Wuhan Railway Bureau said.
Over 60 years, the Wuhan Bridge has seen three generations of maintenance workers, and their techniques have changed significantly since the piece of infrastructure was opened in October 15, 1957.

The first and second generations of bridge maintenance experts moved all materials and tools on and off the bridge with their bare hands. Taking care of this giant used to be labor-intensive.
Workers today have turned to better technology to make their work easier. Hu Jiangang, a member of the bridge’s quality control research team, said at least 10 creative approaches have been developed in the past two years to make maintenance work more efficient.

Thanks to those innovations, it now takes just 50 people to maintain the bridge, down from 300 when it first opened.
“The Wuhan Yangtze River Bridge was designed with 100 years’ service life. Now 60 years have passed and we’ve set a new goal for ourselves, to expand its service life to 150 years with scientific approach applied,” the bridge’s maintenance director Huang Wei said.