About a half a mile from our house in Shanghai there is some serious road construction taking place. The building up of infrastructure is a major push for the Chinese to stimulate their economy and I must say when they build a road; they build a road. The one being built near our home is an elevated highway - elevated at 40ft. Amazing.
Their process for building roads is that they pour the concrete on-site - there are no preform slabs to drop into place or
asphalt to lay with a nice machine. The challenge is the road is to be 40 ft in the air and the forms must be set where the road is going to be. So you see in the picture above scaffolding. This holds the concrete forms in place while the road is being poured gallon by gallon from an army of concrete pumper trucks. I must say there is literally miles and miles of scaffolding... each one set in place and bolted together by hand.
The crews basically work in shifts 24/7 and they are rocking and rolling 7 days a week...welding bar, moving scaffolds, pouring concrete...over and over. The only real day off they get are during national holidays of which there is a couple hand full of days.
You can see on the picture below truly how high this road is being formed as you can see the stairway (in green) going to the top of the road form. I would guess this is a good 4 to 5 stories high.
Once the concrete is formed and hardens...they literally just take the scaffolding down and move it to the next section.
Until next time ponder this...the small little portable shack you see in the front of this picture below with the dirt walking path is where the workers live. Think about that over your summer commute through the season of road construction to your vacation property.
