Chirajara Beam Bridge

Chirajara Beam Bridge
Viaducto Chirajara
Guayabetal, Cundinamarca, Colombia
295 feet high / 90 meters high
308 foot span / 94 meter span
1995

Image by Jimmy Acosta.

Chirajara Bridge is a high beam bridge that crosses a major creek that flows into the great Rio Negro River gorge along the Bogota-Villavicencio highway. In 2021 a second Chirajara Bridge with a cable stayed span of 286 meters opened just downstream of the beam bridge making the route into a divided 4-lane highway. The newer Chirajara Bridge is 150 meters high and is famous in the engineering community due to a sad construction accident that forever tarnished the once perfect track record of zero cable stayed bridge collapses stretching back more then 60 years to the first modern cable stayed span from 1957.

On January 15, 2018, the entire west side of the nearly finished Chirajara Bridge collapsed into the gorge killing 10 construction workers. After an investigation, engineers discovered that the horizontal connection within the diamond-shaped towers was insufficiently designed with a minimal number of prestressing cables. Incorrect calculations were also made about the lateral strength of the concrete diaphragm wall that connected the lower V-shaped legs of the towers.

Completed in 2002, the 122 meter high Pipiral Bridge is the second highest span along the Bogota-Villavicencio route and is located about 10 kilometers to the east of Chirajara.