“Right now, the kids in those towns only go to school through sixth grade because there aren’t enough teachers,” Moran said.
Jose Eligio Medina, the county’s top official, dreams of adventure tourists and hikers exploring the mountains of Sinaloa — a place that the U.S. government now urges American travelers to avoid. “This road is going to change everything for us,” Medina said, already drawing up plans for a restaurant and overlook at the bridge.
Mexico will open its record-setting bridge this year.
‘It didn’t seem possible’
When the first surveyors and engineers reached the bridge site five years ago, it was a four-hour ride on horseback. “We stood at the edge of the canyon and looked across, and it didn’t seem possible,” said engineer Carlos Zamundio, inviting a reporter to walk the newly completed span and peer into the sucking abyss below. “It was like putting together a puzzle, one piece at a time.”
Tradeco, the Mexican firm that built the bridge, had to put 15 miles of dirt roads into near-vertical canyons just to get equipment to the construction site, where 1,300 laborers were employed at the project’s peak.
“We had to build an entire village down here,” said Salvador Sanchez, supervising engineer on the project, speaking in his office at the bottom of the gorge.
Not a single worker died, he said.
In contrast, during a reporter’s trip to the bridge site, there were two trucking accidents on the old highway, one fatal; and at several locations along the route, the large, lumbering vehicles had to stop completely at tight curves, backing up to allow other drivers to squeeze by.
Sanchez said the new highway will go through — rather than over — the Devil’s Backbone, maintaining a consistent 5 percent grade, even on the Baluarte Bridge.
Made of high-grade, pre-stressed concrete, the bridge’s four-lane roadway is held up by bundles of suspension-mounted steel cables. Each five-eighths-inch strand can support more than 80 tons, and when banded together in bundles of up to 46 cables, they can absorb huge earthquakes as well as massive loads, he said.
“You could park heavy trucks on it from one end to another and nothing would happen,” Sanchez said. “It’s ready for anything.”
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