Shanghai Daily news

Jiang Xianquan (left) and his son Jiang Dedong, both Jiangsu Province natives working on the bridge construction site, rest in their dormitory inside the uncompleted bridge girders above the East China Sea.(Photo: Shanghai Daily)

For hundreds of migrant workers helping to build the Donghai Bridge, the country's longest span isn't just a source of employment, it is home for months at a time.
The workers live within the uncompleted girders of the bridge, which hovers above the East China Sea, and move to a new section of the span nearly every month as the project advances.
They also have to work in an isolated area - a vast boundary of water between Shanghai and Zhejiang Province - where there are no shops, mobile signals are unsteady and the temperature difference between the day and night resembles that of the desert.
With a monthly salary of around 1,000 yuan (US$120), not all workers consider their special living condition unbearable, but most of them show concern about the potential risks that they have to encounter while working at the edge of the uneven girders, elevated by the piers above the sea.
"My only pleasure here is to talk with my wife and children when the mobile signal is good," said Wang Youzhi, a migrant worker from Jiangsu Province.
In his "living room," Wang told Shanghai Daily that the indoor atmosphere is very damp and when lying on bed at night, he can hear and "feel" the force of waves hitting the piers.
"If you drop one cup of water on the concrete ground inside, it won't dry for days," he said.
He and some 900 companions, mostly from Jiangsu, Henan and Anhui provinces, are required to live inside the girders to guarantee the bridge can be completed in time. Their "living rooms" are the interior part of the bridge girders - which are designed for cables and pipes to go through. The bridge's 25-kilometer above-sea section is connected by some 670 such girders.
Each of them is a concrete tank about 6 meters wide, 3.5 meters tall and 60 meters long. Workers are required to live inside some of the girders in the middle part of the bridge. Normally, each girder accommodates 100 migrant workers.
After working from 6am to 6pm, they climb down to their living rooms via small well-like entrances on the girder surface.
Stuck out in the middle of nowhere, their only entertainment is reading old magazines, playing cards, listening to the radio and chatting. Most of their daily food is the preserved vegetables and pork.
The bridge, which connects Nanhui District with the under-construction Yangshan Deep Water Port, will span 31 kilometers. "If we accommodate workers on the shore, it will take more time to transport them to the construction site every day - a huge loss of time for the project," said Zhou Chunwang with Shanghai No. 2 Civil Engineering Company.