Members of the public were invited to swing sledgehammers into a glass bridge suspended 300 metres above China’s Zhangjiajie Grand Canyon in a heart-stopping public “safety test.”
According to the official Xinhua News Agency, the owners of the Zhangjiajie Grand Canyon bridge – 430 metres long and billed as the longest glass-bottomed bridge in the world — asked 20 members of the public to drive 12-pound sledgehammers into the overpass over the weekend.
The bridge is located in southern China’s Hunan province and is capable of holding 800 people, according to Xinhua News. It will be open to the public in July.
IN PHOTOS: Would you walk on this glass suspension bridge?
Images of event showed that after a few swings, cracks appeared in the top layer of the glass.
“Even if the glass cracks, it will not break into pieces,” park official Chen Zhidong told the South China Morning Post. “Pedestrians can still walk on it.”
An SUV weighing nearly 2 tons and holding 11 people was rolled over the cracked panels to demonstrate their strength.
The bridge consisted of three layers of the tempered glass: a total of 99 pieces, each three by 4.5 metres and 15 mm thick, according to Xinhua News. Damaged pieces can be switched out for new ones.
The event was planned to quell tourists’ anxiety about the structure after cracks were found in another glass bridge at Yuntai Mountain in October 2015 that led to widespread panic.
Comments