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

Peru's Bridges: Puente Rio Sihuas (2)

One last look at the Puente Rio Sihuas. I did a little investigating to determine what kind of truss this is. The always reliable Bridgehunter shows a similar bridge in Wyoming (the New Fork River Bridge), which he calls a Kingpost pony truss. However, that bridge had only a single floor beam at midspan while this bridge has a floor beam under every vertical member. I wonder if that makes a difference?

I've been talking about how bridges can be used to improve the lives of poor people in Ecuador. I wonder if the lives of poor people in Peru are improved by the Pan-American Highway?

In both Ecuador and Peru, there has been conflict between the mestizos (mixed European and native) and the indigena (native) populations. For a while, there was a war between Shining Path guerrillas and the government of Peru. I saw a documentary on PBS about the Institute for Liberty and Democracy (ILD) that caused a real revolution in the lives of poor people in Peru by giving legal rights (especially for land ownership) to farmers who didn't own the land they lived and worked on.

There's a nice movie, The Motorcycle Diaries (Diarios de motocicleta) about a young Che Guevara taking a motorcycle trip across Latin America and discovering the poverty of the indigena. My feeling is that providing legal rights, sources of capital, and more transportation alternatives (bridges) for poor people may do more to lift them out of poverty than armed revolution.

Peru's Bridges: Puente Rio Sihuas (2) by Mark Yashinsky is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

Peru's Bridges: Puente Rio Sihuas (1)

I thought we might continue south from Ecuador and look at some bridges in Peru. I was there a few years ago to look at bridge damage after one of the large earthquakes that occurred along the Pacific Coast. Peru is an interesting country with extremely tall mountains, a very dry desert (to the west), and the Amazonian River Basin (to the east).

Puente Rio Sihuas is on Highway 18 (the Pan-American Highway) between Arequipa and Camana at latitude16° 20.70’ S and longitude 72° 07.95’ W (we crossed the equator while looking at Walter's bridges in Ecuador).

Puente Rio Sihuas is another pony truss bridge. It has three simple steel through truss spans on pier walls and seat type abutments The superstructure is supported on tall, steel bearings.

Peru's Bridges: Puente Rio Sihuas (1) by Mark Yashinsky is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.