This picturesque 1843 bridge crosses the Durance River in Provence, near the town of Merindol; it is an unusual survivor of an unusual history of French bridges.
In the early part of the 19th century, French engineers built more suspension bridges than in any other country; Paris even had three crossing the Seine. But a terrible accident in 1850, in which 226 soldiers died in a bridge collapse at Angers, and the country lost its taste for suspension bridges. Here's more!
Few were built after that until the 1970s, and many of those in existence were replaced because of fears that they were in danger—and they were. While British and later American engineers tied the ends of cables to giant eye-bars that attached to underground anchorages, French bridges were mostly anchored by splitting the cable into threads and using hydraulic cement to anchor it into the ground—a method that unexpectedly allowed the strands to corrode and eventually snap.
The bridge at Merindol was spared that fate, and continued in use until 1979, when its barely-two-lane width was replaced by an arched highway bridge with a more generous and modern roadway. For a time it continued as a pedestrian bridge, but safety concerns ended that, and there's no (legal) way to get onto the structure, though some do.
Comments (0)