[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.