Civil engineering at its finest. Mayerthorpe in Canda experienced a series of arson attacks that saw a railway trestle bridge engulfed in flames. A crew went straight to work on the bridge after the fire of April 26th and was completed by May 15th. It took a record 20 days to rebuild the bridge after a full redesign of the bridge, then using steel span and concrete tubs they began work. It took 190,000 metric tons of steel and concrete to rebuild the bridge. The bridge is now longer than before.The bridge is now longer than before and harder to destroy due to the bridge that burned down completely made of wood. The bridge was ready for the next train to pass over it under a month after it had burned down. These civil engineers deserve a beer.
Charges were laid against a man named Lawson Michael Schalm, a 19-year-old Mayerthrope man. He was charged with 18 counts of arson. Funnily enough, Schalm was one of the firefighters who assisted with dousing the flames of the trestle bridge he had been suspected to have set alight.
The swiftness of the engineers that rebuilt Mayerthorpe’s trestle bridge were under pressure to do so due to the demand of the railway industry that runs on quick turnaround times and cannot afford to be delayed.
Watch the fly-by footage of the burning bridge from April 26 to the twenty days that followed wherein the bridge was rebuilt: