5. Bridges and quay walls

"Question: what's on every postcard of Amsterdam? Well, I'll answer the question myself right away. It's the canals with the bridges and the quay walls. Not only image-defining, but they form the physical backbone of our city.

But what do you do when that infrastructure suddenly turns out to be vulnerable? And that is exactly what happened a few years ago with collapsing quay walls, cracks in the masonry, sink holes, everywhere you could look up to a collapsing quay wall. So we immediately set to work repairing and renewing those quay walls and keeping heavy traffic out.

But dear friends, we are talking about 850 traffic bridges and 200 kilometers of quay wall. So how do you know exactly what is good, what is moderate and what is really bad? And that's why we immediately started doing inspections above and under water and experimental research, because despite all those inspections we still didn't know exactly how strong a quay wall or bridge really is. If we had applied the calculation models of the time to all our quay walls, they should have actually all collapsed.

Um, yes. So we started doing tests and tests on wooden pile foundations, on masonry, on bridge decks, we started pulling on trees and recently in the middle of the city, checked we brought a quay wall to near collapse. And with results, because many of those bridges and quay walls indeed turned out to be a lot stronger than we had previously thought.

So we were able to sharpen our mathematical models. Example project: Orange Runner. There this meant that we no longer had to replace seven traffic bridges. And we continue to do it, because as you can increasingly realistically determine the strength of your bridge and quay walls, finish it, finish it, quickly, finish it.

Exactly we're also getting more and more grip on management. So so that we intervene in a timely manner and where it's needed. And so we save money, we reduce nuisance, we preserve our heritage as long as possible and we reduce the use of fossil resources.

I'll see you up there on the balcony soon."

This presentation was part of the research carousel during the program "How do you know what you know?" on January 14, 2025 at Paradiso, Amsterdam.

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