Construction workers move a 5.3 million-pound bridge using… dish soap
Published on Apr 28, 2023 at 8:06 AM (UTC+4)
by Kate Bain
Last updated on May 03, 2023 at 1:14 AM (UTC+4)
Edited by
Kate Bain
A group of construction workers has moved a 5.3 million pound bridge using the dish soap you keep under your kitchen sink.
The Utah Department of Transportation (UDOT) posted a video to its Instagram page showing the workers moving the huge freeway overpass 110 feet.
To put in perspective just how heavy the bridge is, it’s about 13 times heavier than a Boeing 747 airplane.
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So how exactly did they do it?
The UDOT said crews put steel beam pads underneath the bridge, then squeezed dish soap onto the pads to reduce friction and make them slippery.
Using the dish soap, they then slid the bridge on hydraulic jacks.
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When the UDOT posted footage of the project to its Instagram page, the post unsurprisingly blew up.
It garnered more than 300,000 likes and hundreds of comments, some of which were hilarious.
“I want to be in that meeting room when this was proposed, like ‘guys, I really think dish soap will work. It worked like a charm to get my cousin’s head out of the stair banister’,” one woman said.
One man said he wasn’t overly surprised by the unusual method, adding that “history is evident that most complicated problems faced by engineers are solved by these kinds of ridiculous methods”.
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This wasn’t even the first time the Utah Department of Transportation used dish soap as part of a massive project.
Just a couple of months ago, UDOT revealed it used dish soap to move a smaller 1.1 million-pound bridge in Utah.
They proudly posted the above footage to their YouTube channel too, and it’s pretty darn impressive.
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Kate is Lead Editor, overseeing coverage across automotive, tech, and lifestyle content on the site. She has more than 10 years’ experience as a journalist and news editor, having worked across a range of major publications including News Corp, Daily Mail Australia, and Sky News. Kate holds a Bachelor of Business Management from University of Queensland and a Postgraduate Diploma in Journalism from Queensland University of Technology. She has been with Supercar Blondie since 2020 and played a key role in establishing supercarblondie.com as a leading automotive news destination.
