France's Millau Viaduct Connected by Pushing Each Other Off Cliffs

The road deck, weighing a total of 36,000 tons, slowly extends from the edges of both cliffs into the void. This is the Millau Viaduct in France, measuring 2,460 meters in length, and the point where the two deck sections had to meet was about 270 meters above the River Tarn. Assembling the deck suspended in mid-air at this height would have posed extreme risks due to working at great heights and strong winds. Therefore, engineers assembled the deck sections not over the valley, but in workshops behind the plateaus on either side. They then used hydraulic launching devices installed on the piers and temporary steel supports to gradually push them out. The challenge was that the long steel plates could sag under their own weight before the end of the deck reached the next support. To counter this, they preemptively attached a steel tower with cables to the extending end to pull it forward. It's like attaching a giant fishing line to the end of a road stretching into the sky.