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Visitors 'scream' as China's new 1,000-meter-high glass walkway cracks

Jah_rastafar_I

Alfrescian (Inf)
Asset
I was just reading about this


[h=1]Cliffside Glass Walkway in China Cracks, but Don’t Worry![/h] By Chris Buckley October 7, 2015 4:29 am October 7, 2015 4:29 am


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The operators of a glass-bottomed walkway clinging to a cliff 3,500 feet above sea level in central China want to reassure visitors that they are quite safe.
Despite the cracks in the glass.
The fractures appeared on part of the 1,300-foot-long see-through walkway just over two weeks after it fully opened, but they were no cause for alarm, said the administration of the Yuntai Mountain scenic park in Henan Province.
“This has no impact on safety,” the administration said in a statement on Tuesday, after word spread online that one of the glass panes had cracked.
But comments online resounded with skepticism about a nationwide vogue for walking, wobbling or crawling along glass-bottomed bridges and walkways at vertiginous heights. Some cited China’s chronic problems with shoddy construction and ineffectual crowd control and argued that the boom in see-through scenic walks lacked transparency.
“This is no joke,” said one of the thousands of comments about the cracks that were published on Weibo, a popular microblog site. “Tourism is taking your life in your own hands. No more of these glass walkways. Just too scary.”
Many news reports shared a description that appeared to set off alarms about the walkway in Henan.
“We were near the end point when suddenly there was a giant ‘crack’ sound and shaking beneath my feet,” said the account that first appeared on Weibo, Southern Metropolitan Daily, a popular tabloid, reported.
“The piece of glass at my feet had shattered,” it said. “At that moment, everyone screamed, and I yelled, ‘It’s really broken, really broken.’ Then everyone ran, pushing the people in front of them.”
But the Yuntai Mountain administration gave a milder account.
On Monday afternoon, it said, safety inspectors were conducting a routine patrol when they came across some small cracks in a pane of glass. The inspectors determined that a sharp object had cracked one of the three layers of glass on the walkway. Some news reports said a dropped metal flask may have caused the cracks.
“To ensure that tourists can have 100 percent confidence in their safety, we have decided to temporarily halt receiving visitors on the glass walkway,” the administration said.
That buttoned-down account did not seem to persuade some. Even People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s dour newspaper, spread word on Twitter and showed video of the dizzying walkway.
“A glass pane on a new transparent walkway shattered yesterday on 3,540ft high cliff on Yuntai Mountain, Central China,” the message read.
And on Weibo, the user whose description spread news of the episode accused the park authorities of lying by playing down the cracks.
“The statement from Yuntai Mountain is wrong,” said the user, going by the name Li Donghai. “It was not just a few cracks in the glass. The whole pane had shattered. Saying that I’m making a mountain out of a mole hill is slander and I won’t take it.”
Efforts to contact Li Donghai were unsuccessful.
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Tourists on the new walkway attached to the side of Yuntai Mountain.

Other tourist spots in China have a lot at stake in the cracked glass. Over the past several years, areas with mountains, deep valleys and steep cliffs have built glass-bottomed bridges and walkways to attract tourists tired of the usual tame fare of shopping and eating.
In addition to the one at Yuntai Mountain, other dizzying glass walkways include a see-through lookout in Chongqing in southwest China. Zhangjiajie, a scenic park in Hunan Province in the south, has a glass-bottomed walkway hundreds of feet high on a cliffside and is also building a 1,400-foot-long glass-bottomed bridge.
In the weeklong National Day holiday, which concluded on Wednesday, the glass-bottomed bridge in Shiniuzhai park in another part of Hunan was crammed, and officials took steps to control the flow of people on the bridge and nearby cliff walkway after numbers reached nearly 20,000 visits a day, Xinhua, the state news agency, reported.
Photo
07SINO-WALKWAY-blog480.jpg

A woman enjoying the journey across the glass-bottomed suspension bridge in Shiniuzhai park in Hunan Province.Credit CHINATOPIX, via Associated Press
The Yuntai Mountain officials said their transparent walkway would promptly reopen after repairs.
“Across the world, similar incidents happen occasionally,” the park administration said. “We thank the broad numbers of tourists for their concern and support!”
 

zookeeper

Alfrescian
Loyal
Never trust glass walkway. It is always built for accident to happen.
At places like Laos, never trust any wooden plank bridges either. I rather swim across the river. :biggrin:
 

Leongsam

High Order Twit / Low SES subject
Admin
Asset
It started when some Tiongs visited the grand canyon and decided to copy the idea... on the cheap.

 

zookeeper

Alfrescian
Loyal
Design flaw.

Grand Canyon - rigid structure supporting glass panels
China - suspension (meaning flexible) bridge supporting glass panels

Glass is rigid. Thus the glass panels in China will take lot of stress.
 

dancingshoes

Alfrescian
Loyal
Design flaw.

Grand Canyon - rigid structure supporting glass panels
China - suspension (meaning flexible) bridge supporting glass panels

Glass is rigid. Thus the glass panels in China will take lot of stress.

if i pay you to cross the bridge, will you?
 

tonychat

Alfrescian (InfP)
Generous Asset
It started when some Tiongs visited the grand canyon and decided to copy the idea... on the cheap.


To build this, you need to create an Engineering Master Piece... I guess Tiongs dun really know what is that?
 

Devil Within

Alfrescian (Inf)
Asset
I knew this would happen. Anything from China communist crooks, are bound to have these quality issues.
 

sleaguepunter

Alfrescian (Inf)
Asset
glass? not reinforced bullet proof grade glass panels?

maybe too many ppl on the bridge at one time, over the weight limit.
 
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