Dubai's prime minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum has approved the design of the seventh crossing over Dubai Creek. The bridge, to be known as the 'Dubai Smile', will carry six lanes in each direction across the 400m-wide waterway.

The Minnesota Department of Transportation has announced that the US state will receive US$20 million in a settlement with HNTB Corporation, which designed the Wakota Bridge project that carries Interstate 494 over the Mississippi River.

The US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has determined that the probable cause of last year’s collapse of the I-35W Bridge in Minneapolis, Minnesota, was the inadequate load capacity some of the gusset plates due to a design error by Sverdrup & Parcel and Associates. The plates failed under a combination of substantial increases in the weight of the bridge following previous modifications, and the traffic and concentrated construction loads on the bridge on the day of the accident.

Construction of a 1.2km cable-stayed bridge is scheduled to start next year in Botswana.

A two-year project is under way to upgrade 19 bridges in the Puget Sound area of the north western USA to current seismic standards.

The brochure that was produced for the Bridge design & engineering Footbridge Awards 2008 is now available as a pdf to download from our site.

Speed is not the only thing that makes the new bridge in Minneapolis special, reports Helena Russell.

Engineers building a new bridge over the Volga River in Ulyanovsk in Russia came up with some interesting solutions for lifting in the main spans. Vladimir Guryanov, Aleksandr Dankovtsev, Stanislav Pshenichnikov and Valeriy Kotov report.

To increase road capacity in the state of Queensland in Australia, the iconic Brisbane Gateway Bridge is being expanded - by building a near-duplicate alongside. Report and photographs by Adrian Greeman.

Formwork being used for construction of some parts of Brisbane’s new Gateway Bridge has been designed to be adaptable for piers and deck alike.

Forensic engineering can provide in-depth understanding of bridge deterioration and failure, says Dr Jonathan Wood, but it is essential for the information to be disseminated rapidly.