Mega Builders

Floating Bridge (4x3)

: 06, 2009

The engineers had no choice. They had to build a new floating bridge in Kelowna, British Columbia. Lake Okanagan was too deep and too muddy to sink columns to support a standard bridge so the engineers designed a bridge of nine pontoons, each as long as a Canadian football field. Then they decided to make the floating pontoons out of concrete! But, with only a dozen or so floating bridges around the world, no one on the construction team has any experience building a floating bridge. Engineers and work crews must learn from scratch how to build the massive pontoons. Then marine crews must tow the concrete behemoths across the lake and line up each pontoon to the next to tolerances of millimeters. It's a tense day when the pontoon that marine project manager Kevin Giberson and his second in command Kevin Hamakawa are towing is pushed dangerously close to submerged cables by Lake Okanagan's currents. But after two and a half years of hard work through blistering Canadian summers and frigid winters, Kelowna and the world get a new floating bridge