[arjunvpaul]

Always happy when bridges get discussed here. Having built (a couple of) bridges across the Mississippi, i can attest that it is possible to build a bridge across the Amazon. This headline is appears to be click bait

A river rising 30 feet is no big deal. I think the Amazon rises more than that actually. The Mississippi very often rises to 40 feet.More in some years. Here's a video of a 300yr flood hitting in the middle of bridge construction - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Orj6B46PJbY (skip and pause at 0:17)

[Brendinooo]

>the river rises thirty feet, and crossings that were once three miles wide can balloon to thirty miles in a matter of weeks.

My impression wasn't so much that it was the 30 feet rise, but the fact that it added 27 miles to the width of the river. Does the Mississippi do that as well? (The Ohio/Monongahela/Allegheny are my baseline, so it's harder to comprehend rivers that do stuff like this!)

[lqet]

This is also hardly an issue, as there are bridges longer than that [0].

As others have pointed out, the main issue is given at the end of the article: nobody needs such a bridge.

> But the real reason for the lack of bridges is simply this: the Amazon Basin has very few roads for bridges to connect. The dense rainforest is sparsely populated outside of a few large cities, and the river itself is the main highway for those traveling through the region.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_longest_bridges

[arjunvpaul]

The Mississippi would, but doesn't to that scale today, because the Army Core has leveed/dyked in most places.

You can see in the pictures here http://bit.ly/2u7f2ta that there is a lot of "marsh" beyond where the river bank ends. You just have to extend the roadway as far as you like. You can see how the bridge extends beyond the river on both sides.

This particular bridge for example has 18 miles of approach roadways. Only about 1600 feet of that, spans the Mississippi.

In short, if flooding adds 27 miles or 270 miles of width, the engineering is pretty much the same. You just have to know, where to start and finish :-)

[Brendinooo]

Very interesting! Thanks for this.

[unreal37]

The real issue is that the area is sparsely populated so you'd end up with a lot of bridges to nowhere.

[pvaldes]

To natural resources ready to be looted. Much easier moving big machines to chop huge trees quickly if you have a road.

[schoen]

The place where I was surprised to learn there's no bridge is between Kinshasa and Brazzaville, capital cities of their respective countries, with populations of about 11 million and 2 million people.

I've then heard that the lack of a bridge may be more due to politics than to engineering problems, but how hard do you think it would be to bridge the Congo in that area?