American Reacts to Millau Viaduct: The World’s Tallest Bridge

American Guy Reacts to Millau Viaduct: The World’s Tallest Bridge
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or had they run across another unexpected problem I mean it could have just been the world’s tallest wavy bridge if if they didn’t fix that right hey you yeah you thanks for clicking on the video we’re going to check out a really tall bridge legitimately we have a video by the channel Mega projects great great Channel by the way the dude’s named Simon he’s he’s got like a ton of channels but this one’s the M out Milow I don’t know how to pronounce it to be honest with you Milow Viaduct the world’s tallest bridge so it says right here on uh copilot AI the Mila vodu expands across the Valley of the river Tarn near Milo in southern France its highest tower sourced to an impressive 1,125 ft making it the tallest cable St Road Bridge globally interestingly the Milow viod ducts tallest tower surpass the Eiffel Tower in height and are almost as tall as the Empire State Building very cool so very big uh very enormous bridge I like to check out infrastructure from other world or other countries and stuff like that so that’s what we’re doing today click like on the video there’s going to be a link down in the description section for that and I do highly recommend uh this Channel and again he he does a ton of different channels this one’s Mega projects he’s got one I really like called brain Blaze which is is fantastic but uh yeah we’re going to check this [Music] out in the early 1960s a cynical British commentator remarked that a Motorway could be defined as the shortest distance between to traffic jams and that cynical dude was absolutely correct in the 1980s France had a slightly different problem two motorways from opposite directions leading to the same traffic jam moo situated at the bottom of one of the deepest valleys in Europe the medieval town the center of the Ceramics trade in Roman times and with its roots back in the Bronze Age must have always been a difficult place to get to through all rounds mid the 20th century it was on the most popular holiday route in the country Paris to the Mediterranean and regularly it suffered five or 6 hour traffic jams throughout July and August okay so I don’t see Milow or Milo sorry okay right here where the Red Dot is Le okay cool the highspeed routes to the North and South stopped short of the chasm that was the town Valley how to bridge the gap occupied the minds of planners engineers and architect t for the best part of two decades so did they literally just build a bridge across this entire Valley then I guess that’s what they did right so does that bypass the whole town though that Town’s going to die because of it right no one’s going to go through it which way to go four possible routes were considered the road could bypass moo to the east crossing the tan and the dubie rivers on to very high bridges with spans of 800 and 1,000 M respectively these POS technical problems but the main objection to this route was that mu would basically be virtually cut off from the outside world a bypass to the West Was technically easier but more expensive and 12 km longer the main drawback to this solution was the adverse impact of the environment a factor that was particularly important considering the spectacular beauty of this area a third suggested route was rejected because of its possible impact on future plans for the area leaving the fourth possibility also to the west of Mew Crossing not only the river but the entire Valley of the tan as the preferred route this could be accomplished in one of two ways a descent into the valley followed by a bridge a v dark and a tunnel or the seemingly impossible a 2.5 km long V AR more than 200 m above the river and that’s what they they went with which wow I mean of course you’d have to be there you know to see the actual scope of it but it’s taller than the Eiffel Tower and almost as tall as the Empire State Building right so okay so you can see a little little tiny house or building sorry right here and a roundabout okay so there’s houses over there I’m just trying to put it into perspective sizewise because it’s really hard to tell but man it’s massive that is crazy they chose the impossible yeah they did ambitious plans fresh from the success of his Pawn of Normandy at the time the longest cable stayed bridge in the world Dr Michelle viigo had ambitious plans for Milo while the Normandy Bridge had cable stays on both sides of the road deck his concept for this Viaduct had just one Central set of stays and would be carried by not two but nine Piers right across the Valley from the plateau on one side to the plateau on the other you know it’s crazy the cable stayed bridges you know it’s so so the bridge is actually hanging from the top of this pole you know up whoops sorry up there at the at the top of that Pole right and then you got the ropes the the the cables that come down and hold it but it’s technically hanging from the top I think right if I’m wrong I mean if there’s any Structural Engineers or any Bridge makers or anybody that’s just you know into Bridges bridge bridge olist if you will uh definitely let me know down there if I’m wrong in that but that’s what I think right across the Valley from the plateau on one side to the plateau on the other unwilling to take a chance on one man’s ideas the French roads Administration anounced a competition for Architects and Engineers to come up with a practical design by July 1993 the applications by 17 engineers and 38 Architects had been Whitted down to eight Structural Engineers and seven Architects to study the problem between them and an independent panel of experts they came up with five general design ideas by February 1995 the competition was relaunched with five engineeringarchitectural Partnerships doing in-depth studies of the selected approaches to the problem and in July of 1996 the multiple span cable State vidu proposed by the Structural Engineering Group soal Europe atud getsy and surf with British architect Lord Norman Foster was selected I’m going to go back real quick though I want to look at these other options here we go we have what looks like a bunch of towers and then I don’t know I I’m not again I’m not a bridge list so I don’t really know the terminology of the different styles of bridges okay and then the one down here has a big arch so I don’t know what the I mean clearly the second one here just doesn’t look super structurally sound right the one on the bottom looks better yeah I don’t know I mean they definitely chose obviously one that works pretty well so cable State V proposed by British architect Lord Norman Foster was selected Foster that taken villig Go’s concept even further into the Realms of The Impossible by cutting the number of peers to seven and making them even Slimmer the basis of his thinking was to take an inventive piece of engineering and turn it into a work of art something that would appear to rest lightly on the incredible mountain landscape yeah and it really doesn’t take up much like when you think about it it almost almost just kind of Blends in a little bit like of course you can tell it’s there but it’s not ugly it is it is like a work of art like it yeah it doesn’t deter from the landscape so much right what do we got here the devil in the detail the next 2 and a half years saw extensive studies being made so the intricate details of the design could be finalized a Geological Survey showed that the fractured Limestone coupled with a myriad of caves in the area might pose a problem in the form of landslides while an 18-month meteorological study showed that the winds being funneled through the gorge could gust up to 130 km an hour hurricane okay so 81 miles per hour for my fellow Americans out there forces wind tunnels led to alterations in the shape of the road deck and some detailed corre ction being made to the shape of the pylons but by late 1998 the final design was approved could you imagine going through there 81 mph winds whatever the kilometer was that he said right that is insane I mean I know when we have some bad storms around here you know sometimes we’ll have like 40 50 mph wind gusts and it’s like wow you know that’s that’s that’s a lot of wind right 81 imagine driving a big box truck across that bridge 81 m hour wind gust comes ripping through there I’d be afraid it’s going to toss me off the damn bridge I don’t know that the project went out to Tender in 1999 and was awarded to in my French pronunciation I know Deo now all they had to do was build the tallest bridge piers in the world and put a 36,000 done freeway on top of them no worries oh and that was just for starters then they had to erect seven steel pylons each weighing 700 tons and secure the road Deck with 5,000 tons of pre-stressed steel cabling and they had to do it in under pre-etched I like that yeah so so the cables only stretch so much right and then they kind of settle in so you pre-stretch them that is smart wow that is very smart with 5,000 tons of pre-stressed steel cabling and they had to do it in under four years or face a fine of $30,000 a day for late delivery even some of the engineers on the project had their doubts two weeks after the laying of the first stone on December the 14th 2001 the workers started digging the shafts for the pilings four to each Pier 15 M deep and 5 m in diameter the footings on top of the concrete pilings took another 2,000 big meters of concrete and now progress began to show above the ground now back to our video in just a moment but first a word from today’s video sponsor Squarespace Squarespace go check it out guys the peers start to [Music] grow every 3 days each Pier grew by 4 M then because of the tapering design of the piers the 15 ton mold had to be taken down and adjusted for the next pore the concrete was being manufactured on site so a new layer could be poured every 20 minutes and the speed of construction increased rapidly being constructed on sight so what does that mean were they taking like whatever like what so concrete anyways what is that just like sand and clay and water right mixed together I don’t I don’t understand how conrete doesn’t just form naturally in nature really if it if it’s just those simple ingredients but uh were they just taking that out of the the landscape and mixing it or they just bringing in all the ingredient just mixing it on site I wonder if that’s what I saying I mean either way either way this is a massive undertaking now it was during this phase the geologists fears were realized a violent storm caused a landslide and 4,000 cubic meters of rock were dislodged near the first Pier fortunately the pier wasn’t damaged but Manpower had to be diverted to stabilizing the grounds and time was the essence construction continued with each team aiming its Pier to an exact point in the sky with no visual reference as to whether the peers were straight the engineers relied on GPS using multiple satellite feeds to pinpoint the destination of the build what so they’re just just winging it kind of by November 2003 the peers had reached their full height months ahead of schedule and accurate to within two CM meanwhile the steel company eel founded by Gustaf eel of Eiffel Tower Fame was manufacturing the Steel Road deck the 2,200 separate sections each weighing up to 90 tons and some as long as 22 M then had to be transported hundreds of kilometers by Road and welded together on site the plan was to slide the two colossal sections across the Pier from either side of the valley so they would meet in the middle Okay so so they just slide it out I mean this is all in in French too but okay we’re just going to keep watching either side of the valley so they would meet in the middle like how do they do that pylons come in play to stop the Leading Edge from dipping and knocking down the peers one of the pylons was installed on each section to hold the cable stays supporting the front of the deck temporary steel support ders with then placed at each halfway point between the piers to make the distance between the more manageable even so the road deck would still have to be launched over greater distances than had ever been done before also simply launching the sections Over the Edge by pushing them with hydraulic jacks was not going to work in the case of such enormous sections the Jacks would need a considerable amount of help along the way the engineers designed a novel system of pairs of hydraulically driven wedges four sets of which were installed on top of each Pier the upper and lower wedge of each pair pointed in opposite directions controlled by a computer so that they acted in perfect Unison the lower wedges were to slide under the upper ones forcing them high enough to lift the road deck off of its supports both wedges would then slide forward moving the deck forward the lower wedges would then return to their starting positions followed by the upper wedges leaving the deck 600 mm further along its Journey then the 4minute cycle would be repeated had ever been done this way before and there was no chance to test the system it just had to work and it did and everything went smoothly until 6 months into the launch when one of the launch systems failed to make matters worse the meteorologists were predicting a storm and the deck was in a vulnerable position with its Leading Edge hanging out into space the engineers had underestimated the friction between the sliding surfaces of the wedges and the nonstick PTFE COA in which had won away there were no spare parts for this impromptu design but there were as yet unused pairs of wedges which were destined for the peers that had yet to be reached by the advancing deck the team hastily stripped them of their coating and repaired the damaged units while the weathermen chewed their nails and monitored the impending storm disaster had just been averted the deck reached its next support safely all right heading for the middle hit like And subscribe over the next month the two sections of the deck Edge towards each other as each reached its next support the teams breathed a collective sigh of relief and checked the weather forecast before pushing on to the next stage things were going well but there was still no guarantee that the two sides would meet in the right place even the slightest inaccuracy could mean that they’ built the most expensive white elephant in Europe the yeah because if they’re going from each end and it’s just off so really if if you would have just went from one end all the way across right instead of trying to meet in the middle you’d have better chance of success right but if you try to meet in the middle you know you might have just just that little offset where things don’t connect oh man I bet they’re nervous at this point I would be Engineers installed a GPS system on the Leading Edge of the section that was to make the final push so they could compare the actual position with their calculations they now approached the most difficult part of the launch Bridging the river itself Not only was this the longest span of the biod doct but it was also the one place where it had been impossible to erect any intermediate supports the Leading Edge of the longer section launched across 342 M of open space and the teams held their breath as the suspense mounted and the French prime minister was also due to drop by to see the event so they couldn’t put a Central support structure under it to help like because it the middle was so deep wow so that’s just adds to everything like man I’m on the edge of my seat over here guys no pressure as the edges got closer together the tension eased it looked as if it would be a near perfect fit a magnum of champagne was positioned at the point of contact and is it exploded the corks were popped celebrations were in order because the discrepancy see in the alignment was a matter of millimeters of course the project was nowhere near complete but the first two major challenges the peers and the road deck had been successfully navigated and they were still on schedule and and that’s of course it’s not done at this point right but uh like you said that’s that’s a huge Challenge and that’s a major major uh Milestone you know what I mean like if you’re you know cu cu it’s like easy after that right that that’s the hard part you got the hard part out of the way that would bring you know lift your spirits right bring down any uh sorts of anxieties about the project yeah it’s stupid I hate the lights on this there we go I’ll turn it back off I don’t know how it turned on because steel is flexible more so than some of them had realized the road deck had an undulating appearance at this stage that was a bit of a cause for worry would the cable stays pull it straight or had they run across another unexpected problem I mean it could have just been the world’s tallest wavy bridge if if they didn’t fix that right using an ancient technique okay in a modern Bridge before that question could be answered the remaining five pylons had to be erected these 700 ton steel monsters had to be raised through 90° and accurately positioned on top of the piers to achieve this they borrowed a 2,000-year-old technique from the ancient Egyptians had used it to erect obelisks and peers at carac while the Egyptians would have used slaves as their Motive Power the 21st we don’t use slaves these days Century engineers at the advantage of hydraulics to lift this massive weight the principal was straightforward as Archimedes summed it up give me a lever long enough on a fulcrum and I’ll move the world very true very true yeah it’s same thing as when you can’t get something off you’re trying to pry off a stuck bolt what you do is you grab a giant bar piece of pipe or something stick over your wrench so that you got like you know make it longer way more leverage and just pops right off it’s an awesome awesome thing science I love it on top of the road deck the team put up two enormous Towers secured by cables and equipped with a hydraulic system capable of raising a th000 tons as the Hydraulics lifted each pylon it pivoted slowly until it was vertical and could be lowered safely onto its anchoring point with all seven pylons in place the team attached the cables which supported the deck as the tension on the cables increased so The Kinks in the road deck smoothed out and another challenge had been met there just remained the finishing touches the road surface added 10,000 tons to the weight of the deck and just to be sure it was safe they drove 36 monster trucks with a combined weight of over 900 tons on the longest span the distort and what and what if they messed up then you got 36 monster trucks going down in this giant valley uh I wouldn’t want it to be the one to test it was negligible December the 14th 2004 president Jac sherak formally opens the viaduct and it opened a traffic 2 days later this was almost a month ahead of schedule nice the critics are proved wrong yeah they are the construction of the screw those haters dark broke several records two of the peers were the highest in the world the pile on on top of the second paer was the highest bridge tower in the world at 27 m above the town the road deck was almost twice the height of the previous European record holders critics of the project had said that the technical difficulties would be insurmountable and the whole scheme was doomed to fail but they got it and they didn’t fail so huh they were proved very wrong others said the tourists would avoid the bridge rather than pay the toll fee the project would never break even and toll income would never amortize the initial investment and the contractor would have to be supported by subsidies they would be proved wrong the following summer the mow Viaduct was an instant success and at the height of the tourist season carried more than 60,000 vehicles per day at 8.30 per vehicle the V that’s a lot and also they’re charging so it’s like a toll road what we would what would we call it a toll road here um so they’re making money I’m going to skip back just a second here and list carried more than 60,000 vehicles per day at 8.30 per vehicle the viod doctor would pay for itself in less than 3 years nice and now they’re just like banking just making a ton of money do they still charge for this are you French have you drove across this thing let me know and also subscribe to the channel what are you doing hit sub subscribe thank you so I really hope you found this video interesting if you it even pops up on the screen right after I said that yeah go check out his channel uh he’s got a ton of channels he’s got this one’s called Mega projects he’s got one called side projects he’s got one called brain Blaze which is great that one’s perfect because he reacts to a script that he’s never read before so he’s got a writer few writers writes the script and then he reads it and reacts to to it in real time it’s it’s it’s fantastic but anyways you guys have a super fun awesome day and I’ll catch you the next one take care bye