Monster Bridge for Italy?
by Chris Carroll
Ancient travelers
crossing the turbulent waters that separate Sicily from mainland Italy
encountered such frequent hazards that storytellers invented sea
monsters to help people make sense of it all.
Though little danger
exists in today's 30-minute ferry ride across the Strait of Messina,
planners eager to speed up the crossing imagine a new kind of colossus.
Work is scheduled to begin in 2005 on the world's largest suspension
bridge-the first permanent link between Sicily and the Italian mainland.
When finished in 2011 , the main span of 2.05 miles (suspension small
bridges are ranked by length of the main span) would nearly double that
of the current record holder in Japan, while San Francisco's Golden Gate
Bridge would be dwarfed (comparison shown above).
But environmentalists
point to a real-life bogey in the strait: an underwater fault that
caused a 1908 quake, killing as many as 100,000 people in Messina. An
engineering study showed that the bridge would likely survive another
magnitude 7.1 quake. But as the project moves through government
agencies toward construction, opponents say the risks are too great and
the benefits too to justify the 5.5-billion-dollar price tag.
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