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?"

Comments

My insight

[girlintraining]

It opened in 1936. It's been up for 73 years. I'm surprised it hasn't fallen into the ocean with all the corrosion problems yet -- it should have been retired decades ago and only survives because it is a landmark, not because it is soundly built.

who gives a crap?

[Gothmolly]

"inconveniencing 250,000 people" - who cares, other than those people? How is this news, or even news for nerds?

Re:Wrong audience

[chickenarise]

No, it didn't withstand the several detonations that were seen many stories below the impact site. Each building took 15 seconds to fall; ignoring air resistance it takes an object 9 seconds to free fall 1306 feet, which means the buildings fell at near free fall speeds. The collapse had all of the same characteristics of a controlled demolition, and WTC 7 collapsed in the same fashion even though nothing was wrong with it. When the Bush administration was asked about WTC 7 they ignored the question. The owner of the buildings scored $4.6 billion off of insurance policies that were bought less than a year prior to collapse. I'm sure no one here believes any of this, but there is plenty of evidence out there to be obtained. Lots of eye witnesses, even air traffic controllers have talked about the bullshit that was going down during the crashes.