Hercilio Luz Bridge

Located in Florianopolis, the capital city of Santa Catarina State in southern Brazil, the Hercilio Luz Bridge is the first bridge constructed to link the Island of Santa Catarina to the mainland.

Hercilio Luz Bridge

Design                          Suspension truss

Longest span                340 m

Opening date               1926

It is the longest suspension bridge in Brazil. The central span was considered quite long (but not the longest, at 340 meters) at the time of its opening and is still one of the 100 largest suspension bridges. The bridge was designed by the firm of Robinson & Steinman, and completed in 1926 and took ten times its original budget to build. It was named in honour of Hercilio Luz, a former governor of the state of Santa Catarina. The bridge has been closed since 1991. It has the fairly unusual feature that the truss carrying the roadway (a continuous stiffening component) is above the roadway itself and meets up with the cables making it non uniform in height. A similar bridge, the Walter Taylor Bridge, was built over the Brisbane River in Brisbane, Australia in 1936. The bridge was built by American Bridge Company, which, perhaps more than any other company in the world, was best qualified to work on a bridge with a continuous stiffening component. The Florianopolis Bridge when built from 1922 to 1926 was the longest eyebar suspension span in existence at that time. The 11 13’-O”-long design features towers with rocker bearings. The company brought to that project its own experimental heat-treated eyebars, and as project contractor pioneered stiffening techniques that saved materials and money while providing greater rigidity. Another bridge of similar design, the Silver Bridge over the Ohio River in the USA, collapsed in 1967 due to a failure in one of the eyebars.