Jörg-Haider-Brücke, Road bridge in Ruden, Austria
The Jörg-Haider-Brücke is a 455-metre road bridge over the Drava on the Lippitzbacher Landesstraße L127, linking Bleiburg and the Petzen ski area with the A2 motorway. Its deck is 12.85 metres wide, including a 2.5-metre cycle path, and the structure reaches a maximum height of 96 metres.
The current bridge opened on 11 December 2005 as the Lippitzbachbrücke, named after the hamlet of Lippitzbach in the municipality of Ruden, with traffic released the following day. On 25 January 2009 Governor Dörfler renamed it in memory of Jörg Haider. A week later its road signs were stolen.
The bridge features a two-and-a-half-meter bronze statue of Saint John of Nepomuk, positioned at its center as the bridge's patron saint.
The bridge carries the Lippitzbacher Landesstraße L127 over the Drava, linking Bleiburg and the Petzen area with the Südautobahn (A2). Its deck is 12.85 m wide, of which 2.5 m is a cycle path, so cyclists cross on their own strip beside the roadway.
The concrete deck of the new bridge carries a section painted orange, the party colour of the BZÖ, applied when the bridge was built. A week after the 2009 renaming, the Jörg-Haider-Brücke signs were stolen. The old iron bridge nearby was blown up twice in May 1919 and is now a monument to the Carinthian defensive struggle.
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