The Qingdao Haiwan Bridge is BIG. This bridge is big enough that you could make 62 Eiffel towers with the same amount of steel. Alternatively, you could make one Eiffel tower 66,000 ft high. Either way, France loses.
The amount of concrete used for the bridge is staggering, 12.1 BILLION pounds to be exact. If you can bench 500 like me, it would take another 26 million of your juiced bros to get the structure off the ground.
A construction project of this magnitude required 20,000 workers over a 5 year period. This corresponds to approximately 450 million kilojoules of man energy, or enough energy to power a Ferrari 430 travelling at 315 km/h for 15 days.
Not only is the Qingdao Haiwan Bridge big, it is also strong. Engineers claim that the bridge can withstand the impact of a 300,000 ton vessel. That would be the same as being hit by 7 Titanics AT THE SAME TIME. Talk about taking a pounding…
The bridge was designed for a capacity of 30,000 vehicles per day. If Ontario were to build this bridge and use it for extra lanes above the 401, the average commuter could get from Mississauga to Oshawa 7% faster. Would such an engineering masterpiece be worth spending 1,095,081,016 billion Zimbabwe dollars on in Canada? Absolutely.
My fellow students, do not despair when you get your calculus midterm back. Remember that you are being trained for a world that can line up billions of pounds of steel and concrete over a 40 kilometer stretch with perfect precision. Let the engineering of the world inspire you with any unit conversions you choose.
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