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What Happened To the Bay Bridge?
farnsworth writes "Tony Alfrey has put together a fascinating page with some history, analysis, and possible explanations for what ultimately went wrong with the recent emergency repair of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. The bridge has been closed for days and is not scheduled to open for days to come, hugely inconveniencing more than 250,000 people a day. His analysis touches on possibly poor welding, a possibly flawed temporary fix, and the absence of a long-term fix or adequate follow-up by Caltrans, the agency responsible for the bridge. Slashdot is a great engineering community; what other insights do you have on the bridge situation?"
Things like this can't be rushed, plain and simple. Carefully executed planning is what's needed to take on these types of projects.
Sure the commuters will have to wait a little bit longer while repairs are done, but it sure beats the mess they're in now.
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has it's limits" - Albert Einstein
The USA is small. Think bigger than just the 250k people. The whole infrastructure in the USA is lagging in maintenance, care, repairs and/or replacements. The USA needs trillions to fix this problem but other shenanigans of course have higher priorities. P
That's what a bridge IS. Alexander did it the expensive way when he went to Tyre, and every single bridge since then is an attempt to connect two places further apart, or more cheaply, or, often, both.
Lets see, when you have a pretty much bankrupt state (California), a bridge that is too necessary to fully replace without inconveniencing many people, the fact that it isn't exactly in a stable environment, with wind, rain and corrosion everywhere is it any surprise that a bridge that has been up for over 70 years needs some emergency repairs?
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
San France should have two bridges (or a secondary tunnel), so if one fails or needs repair, the second can still be used. In Baltimore we have two tunnels and one bridge over the harbor, so if one fails the traffic can be diverted on the other two routes. Redundancy.
In between D.C. and Baltimore we even have three parallel highways - I-95 and 295 and US-1. One might be closed but the other two will still be usable.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
As far as I'm concerned, if a piece of a bridge that has active traffic on it falls off, putting people on the bridge in danger, something went wrong SOMEWHERE.
The real problem is that we should recognize that bridges, and especially landmark bridges, stay standing indefinitely and should therefore quit designing the damn things with puny 50-year design lives!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Meanwhile, in Segovia (Spain), the Roman aqueduct is still up & running :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aqueduct_of_Segovia
Without mortar, with just granite blocks on top of each other, it is more than 2000 years old.
I can't help but wonder when mankind began to suck at building anything that should last more than a few years....
It took me a while to figure out but then I realized: CALTRANS only actually employes three guys.
Driving the 15 in San Diego, I wondered why there were all these construction sites with absolutely no one working. Eventually I pieced it together... CALTRANS only employs three guys and one of those has to hold the sign.
Sure, they could just do one tiny little roadwork at a time. But that'd completely give away the hundreds of millions CALTRANS budget is being spent on three construction workers with the rest going to hookers and blow. Instead, they dump cones everywhere, dig holes everywhere, then quickly move on to the next site. Sure, you'll never actually see a CALTRANS guy working but it sure as hell looks like they must have a lot of people doing the work if they can dig up that much crap and have roadworks every couple of hundred yards.
So, when judging the bridge collapse, try not to blame the three overworked guys. They're doing the best they can. Their job was to put up some cones, slap on some duct tape in the two minutes they had assigned, then get on to making somewhere else look busy. If you want to blame someone, figure out who spends the other 99.9% on those hookers and that blow. Imagine how much could be achieved if his habit went to pay for actual workers instead.
Where did they go? Elsewhere.
Children have been pulling this scam since money existed and they were given money. Give them some lunch money and watch them go and spend it on something non-lunch related, then come back and cry to their parents saying they don't have lunch money. So you can be a heartless parent and make them go hungry and get laughed at by their friends but learn their lesson, or you can give them some more money so that their behavior is reinforced.
Obviously a child being hungry for one day is somewhat less on the 'bad things' scale than thousands of people having to drive an hour away to get across the bay. We can't throw all of these civilians to the wolves and fuck up their lives for years to come, but we can't reward the behavior by just giving them more money. Perhaps the governator needs to install an oversight group to make sure that earmarked funds are used for exactly what they're earmarked for.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
I've seen the steal break many a time before the welds do.. Depending on what you're welding, what you're welding with, most welds are far stronger than the material they are welding together...
Aw, everyone knows Slashdot is full of experts. Even if we don't know what we're talking about, we'll still pretend to be experts. Well, until a real expert speaks up and makes us look stupid. :)
Pshuh, I don't need an expert to make ME look stupid !
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
They did withstand airplane impact. What they did not withstand was hours of several-thousand-degree fire.
that promise was made when planes werent as big as the ones that ran into it though
Perhaps if the state...
Perhaps if you know what the fuck you were talking about. This is why it is pointless to listen to anobody on Slashhdot, 99% of the comments are bullshit.
All the bay bridges, except the Golden Gate, are managed be the Bay Area Toll Authority and funded by tolls. Educate yourself.
http://bata.mtc.ca.gov/
Slashdot - The great and glorious cluster fuck of Internet wisdom.
More likely, you just personally have gotten smarter and wiser.
Slashdot has always been filled with bogosity passing as "insight", it's always had karma-whoring (since moderation started), and it's always had trolls having a nice laugh at everyone's expense. If you were to criticize Slashdot for anything, it's not that it's gotten worse, but that its is going into middle-age without getting any better. It is stuck in that same mid-1990s adolescent "Windows drools, Linux rools, Gimmie warez" state forever and ever.
Although I will agree with you that the moderation system is fundamentally flawed and they just don't care.
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