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Wikipedia / General Rafael Urdaneta Bridge

The General Rafael Urdaneta Bridge is located at the Tablazo Strait outlet of Lake Maracaibo, in western Venezuela. The bridge connects Maracaibo with much of the rest of the country. It is named after General Rafael Urdaneta, a Venezuelan hero of Independence who was born in Maracaibo. It is one of the largest bridges of its kind in the world, the second longest in Latin America after the Rio–Niterói Bridge (13 km), and ranks 80th among the longest bridges in the world.

Design and construction

Made of reinforced and prestressed concrete, the cable-stayed bridge spans from shore to shore. The five main spans are each long. They are supported from tall towers, and provide of clearance to the water below. The bridge carries only vehicles.

The competition to design the bridge started in 1957 and was won by Juan Francisco Otaola Pavan and his partner Oscar Benedetti, Venezuelan civil engineers and owners of Precomprimido C.A., with the design of Riccardo Morandi, an Italian civil engineer. While Morandi designed the bridge, it was Otaola and Benedetti who made the structural and budget calculations, which in part with Otaola's demand for the project to be done by at least 50% of Venezuelan companies and workforce, secured the winning bid for the Venezuelan government. Precomprimido's was the only concrete design out of twelve entries, and was expected to be less expensive to maintain, as well as providing valuable experience of prestressed concrete technology for Venezuela. Precomprimido's construction was aided by several international companies, primarily Julius Berger as well as Grün & Bilfinger, Bauboag AG, Philipp Holzmann AG, Wayss & Freytag and K Ingeniería.

According to eminent bridge engineer Michel Virlogeux:

the Lake Maracaibo Bridge deserves to be part of the series of the most famous bridges over the world, with the Golden Gate Bridge, the bridge over the Firth of Forth, the Brooklyn Bridge, and the Garabit Viaduct.

History

It was opened on 24 August 1962 by the then-president of Venezuela Romulo Betancourt.

In April 1964, parts of the bridge collapsed after a collision with the tanker Esso Maracaibo, causing the deaths of seven people.

In 1979, the cables at pylon 22 snapped due to corrosion; a complicating factor was that the failed cables were located in the bottom layer of the saddle, making their replacement impossible. The government of the time—following the logical course of action—contracted the original designers and builders, leading the firms Precomprimido C.A. and Wayss & Freytag A.G. to devise a rescue plan and a definitive solution on the fly. The final solution was designed by Dr. Juan Otaola; it called for a simplified cable replacement method using a "comb-type" saddle and larger-diameter cables capable of temporarily bearing the load during any future replacement, thereby ensuring greater safety. This solution was published in the ASCE journal *Civil Engineering* (Vol. 52, No. 9, September 1982).

The construction of a second cable-stayed bridge has been proposed since 1982, with a series of studies made since 2000. The cost of the new bridge has been estimated at US$440m, to be largely privately financed via tolls.

The bridge's structural integrity received heightened concern after the August 2018 collapse of a stayed pier on a similar bridge, Ponte Morandi in Genoa, Italy. Both bridges were designed by Riccardo Morandi.

See also

References

  • Dupré, Judith: "Bridges", Könemann, 1998,

  • Virlogeux, Michel: "Bridges with Multiple Cable Stayed Spans", Structural Engineering International, 1/2001

Notes