Toni Rüttimann (born 21 August 1967 in Pontresina) is a Swiss bridge builder who works in Southeast Asia and Latin America, where he is known as "Toni el Suizo" (Toni the Swiss). The bridges are for use of pedestrians, pack animals, motorcycles, two-wheel-tractors – but not for cars. Rüttimann works independently alongside communities in need, using recycled materials and charging no fees. Companies contribute by donating their used material and local governments concede permits and help with transportation in recognition of the fact that the main effort is made by the population. No one asks for anything in return and the bridge belongs to the population who built it. In every country where Rüttimann works, he builds up a small team of national welders and looks for one "bridge-building partner", to whom he teaches his craft, and who in turn is able to perform maintenance duties on the bridges built. Rüttimann has no home residence: he carries everything he needs in two bags. One for his personal belongings, the other for his laptop computer and a few tools for his trade. As of August 22, 2017, in collaboration with local communities, he has built 760 bridges which serve two million people.
Biography
Early life and beginnings in Ecuador Rüttimann was born in Pontresina, Switzerland. In 1987, two weeks before finishing high school at the Lyceum Alpinum Zuoz, Rüttimann saw images on TV of the destruction caused by an earthquake in Ecuador. He decides to depart to South America on the night of his graduation, taking his personal savings and 9000 Swiss Francs donated by neighbours of Pontresina and the Engadine Valley. Once in the disaster area, in northeastern Ecuador, Rüttimann met a Dutch hydraulics engineer. With his technical help and assistance from the people of the Flor del Valle village, cut off from the outside by a tributary of the Aguarico river, he builds a 52-meter long suspension bridge. After six months in Ecuador, Rüttimann returned to Switzerland and began studying civil engineering at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. However, seven weeks later he decided to leave university and returned to Ecuador to help.
In the Amazon region of Ecuador he put together a system for building bridges with local communities, requiring almost no money: the villagers bring stone and sand, the hard wood and their labour. Rüttimann asked for donations of used wire rope from the oil drilling rigs in the region and for scrap pipe from the national oil company Petroecuador. From 1988 to 1990 he built six bridges. One of them, across the Aguarico river with a span of 264 meters, remains the longest of his bridges, as of 2000. Toni el Suizo, as the Ecuadorian peasants named him, invented the "puentes de chatarra" (bridges made of scrap). In the Ecuadorean oil town of Lago Agrio, Rüttimann found a partner in Walter Yánez, a welder and mechanic. Over the next seven years the two friends built another 82 bridges throughout Ecuador – always with the help of the local population – as well as 10 bridges in Colombia, in the wake of the 1994 Páez River earthquake at the Nevado del Huila volcano.
From Ecuador to Central America By November 1998, Rüttimann and Yánez had built 99 bridges. That same month, with air transport by the Ecuadorian Air Force, the two friends rushed to help in Honduras, devastated by Hurricane Mitch, where they built another 33 bridges. Other bridges followed in Costa Rica and Nicaragua, and also an international bridge between Honduras and El Salvador. In 2000, Rüttimann received pipes for 29 bridges in the state of Veracruz, Mexico from the steel pipe manufacturer Tamsa (Tubos de Acero de México SA, today TenarisTamsa).
Passage to Cambodia During his visits to Switzerland, Rüttimann gave presentations in schools and universities. On one such occasion, in 2000, he met a Cambodian refugee who asks him for help in the name of his people. In April 2001, he started working with two teams, with Yánez in Mexico and with his two new Cambodian partners, Yin Sopul, a mechanic, and Pen Sopoan, a truck driver, both survivors of the Cambodian genocide perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge.
Paralyzed by Guillain–Barré syndrome In April 2002, Rüttimann fell ill with Guillain–Barré syndrome, which destroys the myelin of the peripheral nerve system, paralyzing the muscles. Confined to a hospital bed and then admitted to the National Medical Rehabilitation Centre of the Princess Sirindhorn in Thailand, regardless, he never stopped working. In the beginning with a pencil between his lips and the use of his two thumbs, he created a computer program for transforming the measurements sent by his colleagues from Mexico and Cambodia into clear and complete instructions, so that they can continue to build bridges via remote control. This way, Yánez completed 29 bridges in Mexico and then returned to Ecuador, where from 2003 on he continued to build bridges in his homeland.
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