Fifth Yangtze River Bridge opens to traffic soon

By TANG Jun

As a river-crossing city, Nanjing has currently 6 river-crossing bridges or tunnels, and the seventh road channel across the river —— The Nanjing Yangtze River Fifth Bridge, will open to traffic at the end of the year. The Nanjing Yangtze River Fifth Bridge is an important link connecting Nanjing's main city of Jiangnan and the new main city of Jiangbei.

Nanjing Yangtze River Fifth Bridge is located between Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge and Nanjing Yangtze River Third Bridge. This two-way bridge has six lanes and a total length of about 10.33 kilometers. It includes a 4.4km main branch bridge across the river, a 1.8-km branching channel tunnel, and a 4.1km cross-bank connection. The budgetary estimates of the project is about 6.2 billion yuan (US$950 million). The bridge project has been completed and accepted on December 1, 2020, and will be officially opened to traffic soon.

SHEN Bin, deputy commander of the Nanjing Yangtze River Fifth Bridge Project Headquarters, said to Jiemian News that the bridge has set many world records. For example, it’s the first time in the world for the main tower to use steel-concrete composite pylons on a long-span cable-stayed bridge. The main girder is the first time worldwide to use the steel-coarse aggregate reactive powder concrete bridge deck structure. The North Line Overbank Bridge and the Binjiang Avenue Bridge are the world's first continuous box beams constructed with corrugated steel webs using the segmental prefabrication method.

Jiemian reporter saw in the tunnel at the bottom of the bridge that in order to ensure the evacuation of drivers and passengers in emergency situations such as fire hazards, escape routes have been built under the tunnel. According to Shen, the project team calculated through exercises that all the people can be evacuated within five minutes when the traffic volume is full.

China's transportation infrastructure is changing to a more refined and environmentally friendly direction. The Fifth Yangtze River Bridge in Nanjing has set up a rainwater collection system, so that the rainwater mixed with impurities of the bridge deck will not be directly discharged into the Yangtze River. It will be collected and processed in a unified manner.

Jiemian News also learned that when the bridge is opened to traffic, it will achieve full 5G coverage. At the same time, some intelligent monitoring facilities would also monitor the safety performance of the bridge 24 hours a day.