Crimean bridge: the main facts about the construction of the century

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

On December 18, 2018, the first car must cross the bridge across the Kerch Strait. It does not even have an official name yet - someone calls it "Crimean", someone "Kerch". However, this does not affect the course of construction in any way.

Exactly two years before the launch of the bridge, TASS tells the most interesting facts about the "construction of the century".

1. THOUGHTED FOR A THOUSAND YEARS

Thoughts to unite Kerch and Taman are almost a thousand years old. In 1064, Prince Gleb made this path on the ice, counting 14 thousand fathoms (30 km). Only now the prince and the inhabitants of the ancient Russian Tmutarakan principality did not have any technical possibilities to build a bridge. They appeared only in the 19th century.

2. THE ENGLISH COULD NOT, THE GERMANS DIDN'T MAKE IT …

In 1870, Great Britain wanted to build a bridge - for direct rail links with India. But the project seemed costly.

At the beginning of the XX century, the construction of the bridge was planned by Nicholas II, but the plans were changed by the First World War.

In 1943, German troops began to build the bridge for the uninterrupted supply of weapons and troops to the Caucasus. But they did not have time - the Crimea was liberated and the first bridge across the Kerch Strait by the fall of 1944 was built by Soviet engineers.

3. THE FIRST BRIDGE HAS BEEN STANDED FOR SIX YEARS

There is a legend that it was on the first Kerch bridge in February 1945 that Joseph Stalin returned to Moscow from the Yalta conference. Historians, however, assure that only part of the motorcade set off along this path, and Stalin himself drove through the Kherson region.

And soon the bridge did not become at all - in the spring of 1945 it was demolished by a strong ice drift from the Sea of / u200b / u200bAzov.

4.60 YEARS ON FERRY

In 1954, a ferry service was launched between the port "Kavkaz" and the Crimea, which is still in effect.

In the spring of 2015, the ferry crossing was reconstructed, and during the peak season it can carry up to 50 thousand passengers and 10 thousand cars per day.

5. LONGEST BRIDGE

The length of the Kerch Bridge will be 19 kilometers - 11, 5 of them will pass overland, including the island of Taman, 7, 5 km - over the sea. The construction will be the longest in Russia, taking away this title from the Presidential Bridge over the Volga in Ulyanovsk, which is a little less than 13 km long.

6. SUPERS, ECOLOGISTS AND ARCHEOLOGISTS AHEAD OF BUILDERS

Before the start of construction, sappers examined 200 hectares of the coast and water area of the Kerch Strait. And they found about 200 shells from the Great Patriotic War. All of them were disposed of at the landfill.

Environmentalists have transplanted and moved to safe places thousands of plants and 117 animals from the Red Book.

During the excavations, archaeologists discovered more than 3,000 items from the Antiquity, Middle Ages and Bronze Age and handed them over to the Taman Museum Complex.

7. WITHOUT FEAR OF EARTHQUAKES

In the Kerch Strait, there are several tectonic faults and seismically active zones at once. According to the assurances of scientists, earthquakes of magnitude 9-10 are probable here only once every 1000 years.

But even so, the creators of the project made it so that the bridge "bypasses" the fault zones. And all construction sites were strengthened in case of possible earthquakes and landslides.

8. THIRTY-TWO EIFFEL TOWERS IN THE SEA BOTTOM

On the offshore and onshore sections, the builders have already installed more than three thousand of the planned 5, 5 thousand piles and almost 200 of the 595 bridge piers.

One support takes 400 tons of metal structures, which means that so much iron will be spent on all the supports that they could have built 32 Eiffel Towers.

The piles of the bridge are driven into the ground to a depth of 16 meters on land to 94 meters at sea. For comparison, the piles of the 1944 bridge were buried only 12 meters.

9. NOT A BRIDGE, BUT BRIDGES

In fact, two bridges are being built across the Kerch Strait - a road and a railway, which run parallel to each other.

The trains will be able to carry 14 million passengers a year. As for the road, it will be four-lane and high-speed. Up to 40 thousand cars can pass along this route per day - four times more than the ferry service provides today at the very peak of its capabilities.

10. GATES FOR SEA SHIPS

For the movement of ships, the bridge has arched spans. They are 227 meters wide and 35 meters high.

They began to mount the spans this summer at a special site in Kerch. All work is planned to be completed within a year and in August 2017 to deliver the finished structures to the installation site. Both arches, both for the railway and for the road bridge, will weigh 10 thousand tons after assembly.

11. ALL RUSSIA IS BUILDING

3,500 engineers and workers from two dozen Russian regions are involved in the construction of the bridge. Among them are experienced specialists who have built facilities for the APEC summit in Vladivostok, the Universiade in Kazan, and the Sochi Olympics.