Peru's Bridges: Puente Rio Camana

Continuing on Highway 18 towards the Pacific (16° 35.14'S, 72° 43.87'W) we come upon a four span continuous, reinforced concrete box girder bridge on pier walls and seat-type abutments. The soffit rests on steel bearings at the abutments but appears to sit directly on the piers. Perhaps there is a thin steel plate between the soffit and the top of the piers since this long bridge must expand and contract with changes in temperature.

The pier walls have a hexagonal shape that provides cutwaters to deflect debris and reduce dynamic fluid forces on the piers. The piers are attractively tapered below the soffit. The superstructure has vertical sides and supports a streamlined barrier rail.

The concrete is almost the same color as the ground and the surrounding mountains and blends in well with the environment. The bridge seems to be in good shape and appears to have been carefully designed to be an attractive and efficient structure.

At least from the two highway bridges we've seen so far, it appears that Peru has embraced a 'modern' aesthetic for it's highway structures with clean lines and neutral colors.

Peru's Bridges: Puente Rio Camana by Mark Yashinsky is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States Licens