Padma Bridge Visited

It was a hot Monday morning on the 24th of May and I had been awake all night from the excitement of visiting the Padma Bridge, Bangladesh’s iconic infrastructure mega project.

At 9:30PM we left home and took the road for the Mawa Highway past the Dhaka University Campus, over the Hanif flyover, and finally arrived near the Mawa Bridge Point having driven 50 kilometers in 1.5 hours. Our first course of business was to meet Padma Bridge Engineers at one of their quarters and after getting acquainted we had some snacks and tea headed out for the Bridge construction site.

From the Engineer’s quarters, the Padma Bridge site was about a 10 min drive. After passing through an inspection check-point we stopped at the Pier One parking-lot and walked to the first Pier where the Bridge is directly over the Padma River. The Bridge spans a total of 42 piers for a length of 6.15 km. The height of the bridge varies from 18.5 meters to 25 meters. Interestingly the shape of the Bridge is the letter ‘S’, which was chosen to maintain high structural integrity.

The Padma Bridge has two decks; the lower deck is for an Electric Rail Line where trains will be carrying passengers and the upper deck is for the road itself. The Bridge will also be used to transport gas through a dedicated Gas Pipe Line.

The width of the Padma River is so vast you cannot see the other end of the River. However; there are speed boats, ferries, and loading boats that the workers and locals use to cross the bridge. Crossing the bridge speed boats take 15-20 min, by ferry it is 45 min, and load boats take around one hour. We wanted to see the Bridge from the other side of River, however it started raining and we had to abandon the idea.

At any given time there are a total of 3,500 workers at the multi-purpose Padma Bridge. 750 of the workers are from China, 350 to 400 are engineers from Bangladesh, and the remainder workers are from Bangladesh and several other countries including; China, Malaysia, and Turkey.

The completion date of the Padma Bridge is estimated to be in June 2022.

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