China keeps trying to prove its glass bridge is safe, so it drove a 2-tonne SUV over it
Just in case the public wasn't sufficiently convinced by a journalist smashing the world's longest and highest glass bridge with a sledgehammer (and surviving), the owners of the Zhangjiajie Grand Canyon bridge in China decided to prove its safety by upping the ante over the weekend.
In its latest media-directed "safety test" of the 430-meter bridge, suspended a heart-stopping 300 meters above a gorge, the Zhangjiajie national park's owners had 20 volunteers swing sledgehammers at the glass, making visible cracks in the top layer.
Then, a Volvo XC90 SUV carrying 11 people rolled over the cracked panels, Xinhua reported.
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Like many other glass bridges and viewing structures across the world, the Zhangjiajie bridge's glass panels are made of multiple layers, so visible cracks don't mean the panels will give way.
Zhangjiajie's three-layered glass panels measure 3m by 4.5m, and each layer is 15mm-thick.
The organisers are staging all of these safety "showcases" ahead of Zhangjiajie's grand opening slated for July.
The bridge, designed by Israeli architect Haim Dotan, was built at a cost of about 460 million yuan ($69 million), and the national park's operators are keen to assuage the public's fears of the bridge being unsafe.
It hasn't been too long since another glass bridge in China cracked, after all. The Yuntai Mountain Geological Park's glass bridge cracked back in Oct. 2015, after a tourist dropped a mug on one of the panels on the walkway. People on it noticed the crack and, understandably, started screaming.
While the park's spokesperson said that only one of three layers of glass on the panel broke, it freaked people out enough that the skywalk has been closed since.
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Victoria Ho is Mashable's Asia Editor, based in Singapore. She previously reported on news and tech at The Business Times, TechCrunch and ZDNet. When she isn't writing, she's making music with her band
