South Bridge (Koblenz)

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Coordinates: 50 ° 19 ′ 58 "  N , 7 ° 35 ′ 38"  E

B327 Koblenz south bridge
Koblenz south bridge
Official name Rhine bridge Koblenz-Süd
use Federal road
Convicted Bundesstrasse 327
Crossing of Rhine
place Koblenz
Entertained by State Office for Mobility Rhineland-Palatinate
construction Girder bridge
overall length 442 m
width 29 m
Longest span 236 m
vehicles per day over 40,000
building-costs 104 million DM
start of building 1969
completion 1975
opening June 20, 1975
planner Georg Strigl
location
Südbrücke (Koblenz) (Rhineland-Palatinate)
South Bridge (Koblenz)
Road map of the Koblenz area
Bridges koblenz.png
7 = south bridge
p1
The south bridge Koblenz (left) and the Horchheimer railway bridge (right) seen from the right bank of the Rhine

The south bridge is an important traffic route over the Rhine in Koblenz . The bridge links as part of a large built Südtangente the B 327 with connection to the B 9 on the left bank ( Oberwerth ) and the B 49 with connection to the B 42 on the right bank ( Horchheim ). It is located at Rhine kilometer 588 and is the first bridge on the Middle Rhine below the Schiersteiner Bridge ( A 643 ) near Wiesbaden, 84 km up the Rhine .

The overall project "Südtangente Koblenz" over a length of 12 km was realized in two construction phases. The first construction phase from 1969 to 1975 comprised the construction of the south bridge and its connections. In a second construction phase completed in 1986, a section of the B 49 was inaugurated as a bypass road for parts of the city on the right bank of the Rhine. During the construction phase of the first construction phase, two serious accidents occurred in which 19 workers died.

history

South bypass Koblenz

With the construction of a spacious south bypass in Koblenz, an urgent traffic problem in the city was to be solved. Drivers who came via the Hunsrückhöhenstrasse (B 327) and wanted to continue into the Westerwald (B 49) previously had to drive via the Karthaus , then through the center of the city and finally cross the Rhine over the Pfaffendorfer Bridge . This bridge created a "bottleneck" on the Pfaffendorf side, which led to traffic problems in the city center. This bottleneck was removed in 2003 with the opening of the Glockenberg tunnel.

The solution for long-distance traffic, but also for local and inner-city traffic, was the construction of the "Südtangente Koblenz", as the project is called by the Rhineland-Palatinate road administration . In the first phase of construction 1969–1975, a new bridge over the Rhine with cross-free connections on both sides was built. On the heights in Koblenz City Forest was before Karthause the B 327 over a slope bridge in Laubachtal moved to the left bank of the south bridge connection. This is where the connection to the newly created elevated road system takes place with connections to the B 9 and Mainzer Straße ( southern suburb ). The connection on the right bank of the Rhine was realized with a connection to the B 42 and to Emser Straße (Horchheim).

With the completion of the southern bridge and its connections in the Koblenz area, however, the overall project “Südtangente Koblenz” was not yet fully completed. The second construction phase, the new construction of an approximately 8 km long section of the B 49 including the green bridge from the Horchheim junction on the right bank of the Rhine (B 327 / B 42) to Bad Ems -Denzerheide ( B 261 ), was only opened to traffic in November 1986. This relieved the Koblenz districts of Pfaffendorf, Ehrenbreitstein and Niederberg , where the B 49 originally ran (today L 127).

Bridge construction 1969–1975

The first construction phase of the "Südtangente Koblenz" was planned by civil engineer Georg Strigl and the execution was awarded in four construction lots . The static calculations of the steel superstructure of the Rhine bridge alone took up a total of around 16,000 A4 pages. The actual bridge (Lot B) started in October 1969 by the Working Group was MAN Gustavsburg and Philipp Holzmann AG in cantilever executed. The landscape and the proximity of the Horchheimer railway bridge 36 m away and running parallel led to the choice of a girder bridge for design reasons . The two river piers of the South Bridge are exactly in the escape of the pillars of the railway bridge. The bridge construction was completed in June 1975 after the disaster of 1971 interrupted the work.

The elevated road system on the left bank of the Rhine (Lot C) was built from April 1970 to December 1972 and the elevated road system on the right bank of the Rhine (Lot A) from February 1971 to the end of 1972. The slope bridge in the Laubach Valley (Lot D), which was started in April 1970, was not completed until spring 1974 after the second accident in 1972. Most of the buildings in the Bad Laubach cold water sanatorium, which was built in 1840–1843, had to be demolished for the slope bridge .

After the two accidents, for a few years the picture was of a bridge with a gap of about 60 meters over the Rhine. It was not until 1975 that the missing piece was brought to the bridge on a heavy-duty pontoon, pulled up by strand jacks and finally installed.

and display information about the image
Panorama of the south bridge

First accident in 1971

On November 10, 1971, the last cantilever of the south bridge was to be installed for the half of the bridge on the left bank of the Rhine. However, before the box trough could be lifted completely from the pontoon with a derrick crane of around 100 tons , the cantilever arm on the Oberwerther side bent over a length of around 54 m and fell with workers and equipment from a height of around 30 m into the Rhine. In this accident 13 people were killed and another 13 people were seriously injured. Some of the dead could not be recovered from the Rhine until days later.

All available aid organizations were called in to untangle the individual parts that had fallen in the bridge accident. More than 100 ships were stowed on the Rhine in front of the site of the accident the day after the collapse. It turned out to be very difficult to recover the fallen section of the bridge. MAN CEO Karl Schott stated at a press conference on November 11, 1971 that 24 copies of this fully welded bridge type had already been built worldwide and that there had never been an accident. A material defect was ruled out by those responsible. The investigations into the cause of the accident took a full year, so that construction could only be continued from April 1973. As a result of the accident (and some other similar bridge accidents in the early 1970s as the construction of the West Gate Bridge in Melbourne ) were technical regulations on the bumps of plates and shells changed (DIN 18800). The cause of the failure was a construction detail of the welding of the base plate and longitudinal reinforcement in the box girder. The bridge was strengthened as the construction continued and the cantilever arm lengths were reduced during the construction phase.

Second accident in 1972

Another accident occurred on September 21, 1972 at the slope bridge in the Laubachtal. The concreting work for the twelfth Überfeld the collapsed scaffolding and ripped six workers to death. Work on this site did not resume until November 1973. After months of investigation, the cause of the accident was given as “material deficiencies and a serious failure”. When erecting the scaffolding, the so-called buckling stiffness , which guarantees the stability of scaffolding, was forgotten.

  • The southern bridge with the feeder roads on the left bank of the Rhine, seen from the Karthauser

  • Slope bridge in the Laubachtal (above) and the junction on the left bank of the Rhine next to the Oberwerth sports park

  • Südbrücke (left) and Horchheimer railway bridge

  • View from the Rittersturz to the south bridge and the Oberwerth stadium

  • Memorial plaque to the victims of the bridge construction

building-costs

The elevated road system on the left bank of the Rhine on the Oberwerther side
The slope bridge in the Laubachtal

At the beginning of the 1970s four bridges were under construction or under renovation in Koblenz. The construction costs of the two bridgeheads were already at the Neue Moselbrücke (today Europabrücke ) on a similar scale as the pure bridge construction. In the case of the south bridge, however, the costs for the two-sided connections of the new Rhine bridge exceeded those of the actual bridge construction many times over.

The costs for the bridge structure and the bilateral connections to the B 49 / B 42 and to the B 327 / B 9 in the amount of 104 million DM (139,249,208 €), of which 18.5 million DM (24,770,292 The Federal Republic of Germany paid for the land purchase, since the south bridge was a construction for a federal highway .

Name and handover

The Koblenz city council decided on February 19, 1974 to name the bridge “Europabrücke”. However, the state government of Rhineland-Palatinate did not agree to this naming in a decision of May 9, 1975. This was preceded by a rejection of this name by the Federal Ministry of Transport . The second road bridge over the Rhine in Koblenz was opened to traffic on June 20, 1975 with the simple name "Südbrücke". The opening ceremony was attended by the Lord Mayor of Koblenz, Willi Hört , the Minister of Transport for Rhineland-Palatinate, Heinrich Holkenbrink , the President of the Rhineland-Palatinate Road Administration, Hubert Klaas, and the former Prime Minister and honorary citizen of Koblenz, Peter Altmeier . The construction period, interrupted by two serious accidents, was almost six years.

A memorial plaque on the pillar on the left bank of the Rhine (Oberwerth), unveiled on the opening day, commemorates the 19 technicians and workers who died while building the bridge.

construction

View from the Oberwerther side of the river pillar of the south bridge

The Koblenz south bridge is 442 m long. However, the length of the entire southern bypass with its connections and feeders is many times greater. It extends over 12 km from the junction (B 327) south of the Karthauses to the heights of the Denzerheide just before Neuhäusel .

The girder bridge over the Rhine has a longest span of 236 m above the shipping channel. The spans of the two side openings are 103 m each. The south bridge has six lanes and is 29 m wide. The roadway (cover plate) of the bridge structure made of hollow boxes consists of so-called orthotropic plates .

The south bridge in the film

See also

literature

  • Energieversorgung Mittelrhein GmbH (ed.): History of the city of Koblenz . Overall editing: Ingrid Bátori in conjunction with Dieter Kerber and Hans Josef Schmidt
    • Vol. 1: From the beginning to the end of the electoral era . Theiss, Stuttgart 1992. ISBN 3-8062-0876-X
    • Vol. 2: From the French city to the present . Theiss, Stuttgart 1993. ISBN 3-8062-1036-5
  • City of Koblenz (Ed.): Koblenz City of Bridges , documentation for the inauguration of the Koblenz Balduin Bridge, Koblenz, August 1975
  • W. Bisse: On the cause of the steel bridge crash Koblenz-Horchheim , Der Tiefbau, Volume 15, 1979, pp. 12-18
  • Joachim Scheer : Failed Bridges , Ernst and Son, 2010

Web links

Commons : Südbrücke Koblenz  - Album with pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ 25 years ago the first cars rolled over the Koblenzer Südtangente in: Rhein-Zeitung , December 7th, 2011
  2. ^ The sections of the south bridge and their completion in: Rhein-Zeitung , November 10, 2011
  3. ^ The Südbrücken disaster: 40 years ago 13 construction workers died in Koblenz in: Rhein-Zeitung , November 10, 2011
  4. ↑ Report by Otto Steinhardt 1972, presented in Scheer, Failed Bridges, Ernst and Son, 2010, p. 58
  5. ^ Südbrücke: Errors in the scaffolding led to the tragedy of 1972 in: Rhein-Zeitung , November 11, 2011
The next bridge upstream:
Hindenburg Bridge (Bingen / Rüdesheim) (destroyed)
Schiersteiner Bridge (Mainz / Wiesbaden) 		Bridges over the Rhine The next bridge downstream:
Horchheimer Eisenbahnbrücke