Strait of Messina Bridge

Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi pledged in June 2002 to build the bridge at last, but its construction remains a huge undertaking. Advances in computer modeling mean structures can be designed lighter and stronger, making possible a single 2-mile-long, 10-lane span suspended from 4-foot-diameter cables hanging from 1,000-foot towers built on the mainland and the island. The span would beat the current world-record holder, Japan’s Akashi Kaikyo suspension bridge, by 66 percent. The land-based towers eliminate the problem of building support bases in the turbulent water; a suspension bridge allows the span to flex up to 30 feet during earthquakes. But the wind remains treacherous to the bridge and to large trucks and trains crossing it, says Khaled Mahmoud, director of long-span bridges at Hardesty & Hanover, a New York engineering firm that first began sketching Messina designs in 1969. Using computer and wind-tunnel models, engineers have designed steel box bridge sections that will act like giant aircraft wings to deflect the wind, mitigating the same vortex shedding that bedevils tall buildings. The bridge project remains stalled, however; the Italian government can’t manage the enormous expense on its own, and private investors fret there won’t be enough traffic to recoup their outlay.

Longer than the Golden Gate [New Norwegian bridge to be built]
Aftenpost.com | March 1, 2006 | by Gunnar Magnus and Halvor Hegtun
Posted on 03/01/2006 7:46:18 PM EST by aculeus
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1588155/posts

Bridging the Strait of Messina
by Carlo Trabia
Best of Sicily Magazine
Amid popular pleas to avoid assigning construction contracts to Mafia-controlled companies (a problem prevalent throughout southern Italy but worse in Sicily and Calabria), politicians promised strict review procedures to ensure that corruption might be avoided. Among northern firms bidding on such contracts, simple bribes ("tangenti") are more frequent than organised crime per se.

Only since the 1980s has the bridge proposal been studied seriously. Apart from endemic political corruption, potential special interests and plain indifference, environmental factors have been cited as a reason for not building the bridge. However, environmentalists rarely explain precisely how a bridge would, in itself, threaten wildlife or the coastline moreso than the current maritime traffic, and reasonably reliable environmental studies indicate that the bridge will cause no undue damage. The possibility of earthquakes is sometimes mentioned, but San Francisco's bridge has thus far withstood seismic events and poses no obvious environmental threat. On the contrary, it is well integrated into the marine and coastal environments.

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