MSP bridge collapse...
 

:td: :noes:

Totally not cool... I've been on that thing too...

Work is going to get busy...

i feel bad for the guys who put their stamps on that one.

That bridge is ~2mi from my sister's house. She and her husband were planning on heading that way at the time of the collapse, but she had too much stuff to finish at work. Pretty crazy.

All initial signs point to damage done during the resurfacing performed the day previous.

Errrr....

http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/08/02/bri...ure/index.html

The plane aspect makes me worry for the engineer

I can't say much, because I'm being dragged into the detailed investigation, but, like all failures, this is looking to be an unfortunate overlapping of faults from several sources.

By the way, 16% of all bridges in the US are classified as structurally deficient. Doesn't mean we can close them all. I just hope we don't have too many of these types of accidents to wake up the DOTs, and lead them away from their "lowest bidder" requirement and segregated approach to design and construction.

edit: If you want a real scare about the state of our bridges, read the ASCE State of the Infrastructure report card. Or, there was an interesting article published in the August 2003 Journal of Performance of Constructed Facilities by some guys at OSU that does some statistical analysis of US bridge failures. Scary stuff

Who are you with?

Officially, I'm an independent forensic engineering and failure investigation contract consultant, but I work mainly with a few firms and public agencies in particular, who don't like to broadcast that they farm out some of their work ;)

edit: what a mouthful. Ick

Thats funny cause anyone in engineering knows that everyone farms everything, even huge firms. But no one likes to say it. Its especially funny then business for one firm is down and all the consultants are suddenly next door.

It's not the other engineers we have to keep quiet to...it's when you're dealing with high-profile catastrophes and governments are involved. That's when the ambulance-chaser equivalents and media come out searching for anywhere to point a finger. "What, don't you trust your own employees? Or are you just too cheap?"

I just finished up a project for the Japanese government, and you wouldn't believe how hush-hush I have to be about that one. Things are even more sensitive over there.

Just remember...the technical side of engineering is the easy part. Any trained monkey (read: tech school grad.) can crunch numbers or analyze a model. It's people that cause real the challenges.

Oh i know. When i was with the DOE doing facility audits, we weren't able to talk to employees because of the fucked up rules they had.

the finger pointing was actually a part of the deterrent to getting my PE license! EFF THAT.

Yea, but the trick is to have it and not use it :)

In light of this tragedy someone wrote an article about the 110 bridges in CO that are on a "watch list." One particularly high volume stretch will become a 200-300 million dollar project when it is renovated/replaced. We currently have $35 million budgeted for bridges this year. Now with all the money we spend on homeland security so that terrorists don't blow up bridges and what not, what's the fucking point when there's no room in the budget to keep them from coming down on their own? Fucked up.

Atlanta, were you part of the investigation into the C470 overpass failure near Golden that killed a family?

Nope.

As to your other point...it's been common knowledge in the civil engineering community for decades that the infrastructure is basically dead. And they haven't kept it a secret...they've been lobbying this whole time. But estimates are that it would cost many trillions of dollars to get us to a passing grade of "C"

Well and lets be honest, people who work for state infrastructure are usually the C students of Civil Engineers, and Civil engineers are the "C"s of the engineering world.

Now now, no need to get personal...there are exceptions to every stereotype ;)

thats true, but there's a reason stereotypes exist in the first place :)

This coming from the Jew ;)