Biography | Ulf Widerström — Six Kilometres of Prefab Concrete Across Kalmarsund

The longest Swedish road he signed for is not in Stockholm. It is this beam across Kalmarsund.

Skånska Cementgjuteriet took the Ölandsbron contract in 1967, two years into Widerström's time as managing director.

Skanska's own account and the bridge's Wikipedia article agree on the outline. The first sod on the Småland side was cut on 30 December 1967. The matching cut on Öland came on 4 January 1968.

The span is 6,072 metres. When Crown Prince Carl Gustaf opened it on 30 September 1972 it was the longest bridge in Europe, a title it kept until the Vasco da Gama Bridge opened in 1998.

The official cost published for the works is 130 million kronor.

The method was prefabrication. Large concrete segments were cast under cover, then carried out and set on piers in brackish water whose clay-and-limestone bed made the foundations slow.

Later repair campaigns found chloride damage in parts of the low-bridge sections, a maintenance story that belongs to Trafikverket and to later decades, not to the opening day.

The pin is the structure itself, the public work that still carries länsväg 137 between Jutnabben in Kalmar and Möllstorp by Färjestaden.

Widerström did not pour the segments. He ran the contractor that did, in the years when the same firm was also turning out thousands of Million Programme flats a year.

The bridge is still the road. There is no ticket booth and no original site hut to visit. Stand at either abutment and the length is the fact.

Photo: Proton sv, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons