Ekki bridge set for YouTube stardom

The truss girder footbridge spans a dual carriageway and a railway in the coastal town of Wenduine, and was built by the Belgian agency for maritime and coastal services to enable people to easily access the dunes and beech.

It was designed by Rotterdam-based architects West8 and engineered by Arup. The main contractor was Belgian business Westconstruct, but the fabrication and installation was undertaken by Wijma Kampen, the Netherlands hardwood specialist, which also supplied the timber.

"It's a visually stunning project and a great advert for hardwood," said Wijma managing director Ad Wesselink. "And the timber not only looks good, it has been selected because of its environment, exposed to the wind and sand and salt air."

The bridge, he added, is designed to look "chaotic and random" in stucture to look as though its made of driftwood from a shipwreck.
"It's called the 'Wrackhout' or wreck wood bridge," said Mr Wesselink.

In fact, the structure is extremely precisely made and engineered, to not only ensure that it lasts and performs, but that it could be built rapidly in prefabricated sections, made by Wijma, to minimise disruption to traffic and rail services.

It was designed as a truss girder, with the timber components under both compression and tension and connected with 65mm pins and bolts.

The solid ekki sections are 120x250mm and up to 6m long.

"The whole structure was designed in 3D which enabled us to machine all the parts completely by CNC machining centre," said Mr Wesselink. "This was also necessary as there was a total of 600 parts."

The construction started by pre-assembling the timber framework at ground level on site into individual sections up to 14m long and weighing up to 36 tonnes.

"Using this size of section meant the structure went up very quickly and the road only needed to be closed for a couple of nights," said Mr Wesselink.

All the timber is FSC-certified and said Mr Wesselink could also be a valuable promotional tool for the Sustainable Tropical Timber Coalition, the Dutch-based international initiative, which Wijma backs, to raise the profile and increase European market share of certified tropical timber
The YouTube video is at www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=-ZA823Uwy_g

The ekki bridge features on YouTube