Sleep well! 86 excavators demolish Chinese city overpass overnight
Half-kilometre section of elevated road that once handled 100,000 vehicles a day reduced to rubble by dawn on Sunday
Close to a hundred excavators tore down a highway overpass in eastern China overnight to pave way for the construction of a subway line, state media reported.
At about 10:30pm on Saturday, 86 excavators lined up on both sides of the 500 metre elevated road in Nanchang, capital of Jiangxi province, and began pounding away with their wrecking hammers.
The Yonghe Gate overpass was built above a main road connecting the city’s southern and northern suburbs, and by the early Sunday morning, the 24-year-old structure had been reduced to piles of rubble.
The bridge, named after the city’s ancient former Yonghe Gate, was built in the 1990s at the height of a traffic infrastructure construction boom in the city. The overpass has helped ease traffic congestion on nearby roads nearby since its inception, but its closed design also prevents it from diverting vehicles to other routes once it becomes congested itself, according to the report carried on Thepaper.cn, a state-run news website based in Shanghai.