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Engineering Experts Knew Italian Bridge Had Corrosion Problems Before It Collapsed, Report Says (apnews.com)
McGruber shares a report: Engineering experts determined in February that corrosion of the metal cables supporting the Genoa highway bridge had reduced the bridge's strength by 20 percent -- a finding that came months before it collapsed last week, Italian media reported Monday. Despite the findings, newsmagazine Espresso wrote that "neither the ministry, nor the highway company, ever considered it necessary to limit traffic, divert heavy trucks, reduce the roadway from two to one lanes or reduce the speed" of vehicles on the key artery for the northern port city. A large section of the Morandi Bridge collapsed Aug. 14 during a heavy downpour, killing 43 people and forcing the evacuation of more than 600 people living in apartment buildings beneath another section of the bridge.
its-a bigga bridge!
If corrosion weekend the cables by 20% of so, it seems like the original design didn't leave nearly enough margin for error!
I imagine they were not as concerned with 20% weakening thinking they had much more leeway.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If the bridge was only over-engineered by 20%, then it would be a disaster to keep using it. That sounds like way too small a margin. They must have underestimated how badly damaged the cable was. If you're looking for someone to blame, it's the people who estimated the strength loss factor, not the people who did nothing once they found out.
private owned toll road the profit lost from an shutdown is to high just fix in place.
Beautiful but also fragile. See Ferrari or Lamborghini.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Itâ(TM)s not just that, the bridge was hopelessly overloaded by traffic.
Have you ever driven in New York City? Every bridge is totally full of traffic nearly 24x7, during rush hour basically parked (it took me an hour once to cross George Washington bridge leaving NYC near rush hour). That happens every day, including in driving rainstorms... bridges are usually built assuming the bridge is packed with trucks, during the worst storm imaginable (including many feet of snow, far worse than rain), then use safety margins well beyond that. It seems the designers of this bridge cut some corners.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
So what you're saying is that the government failed in its role of delivering oversight of private road companies for the betterment of the people?
So what possesses you to think that they'd be any better at providing oversight of a government owned bridge?
Apparently the answer to private industry failures is more government and the answer to government failures is more government.
the bridge was built in the 60's and they just last year got around to inspecting it for corrosion and weakening?
The main reason for government to privatize anything is to help their non-government corporate friends make tax-payer money. The second reason is so that when shit inevitably happens due to all the profit taking instead of maintenance, the government can pass the blame out of government so their political greedy ass can keep it's 'job'.
The bridge was in constant need of repairs throughout its lifetime , which allowed politicians to distribute contracts to friends and get richer. Overall, a big success. Then one day, they decided to go fully private ( i.e. giving it to other "friends" ), and thats when things went wrong, because basically you eliminate the need of contracts, they just sat on it , collecting tools and waiting for it to collapse, because basically it's cheaper to re-build and give minimal compensation to the eventual victims, in the long term.
At the time the bridge was built, I suspect that the factor of safety used in the design was likely 2x (200%), so having a reduction of 20% of load carrying capacity would not have raised any alarm bells as the bridge would not have been anywhere near its design limits. Obviously either the original factor of safety was calculated incorrectly or the the examination underestimated the weakening of the bridge due to corrosion. The bad weather and lightening strike could have also been a factor in its collapse. Let's wait until the cause of failure is determined by a thorough failure analysis, rather than making statements that have no technical backup.
https://web.archive.org/web/20...
I am curious. Where did the toll monies go? Obviously not into maintaining the bridge.
One article I read said there was a good likelihood the bridge was constructed using less concrete than specified, because the mafia was heavily involved in bidding for these projects at the time. One of their favorite ways to win low bids for construction was skimping on the concrete used.
you're a fucking retard, you do know this, right?
Twitter will not solve the "mistery" - a proper investigation will do. I know it will take time but at least it will cut sensationalism. Just give it a time.
No, the answer to both these issues is better government. Just because your local shithole has terrible government it does not follow that good government is impossilble.
I-35w bridge collapse was USA's wake-up-call!
When they identified corrosion problems with the main cables on this bridge, they installed dehumidifiers for the cables. They also built a replacement bridge and now use the older bridge as a public transport route, a traffic level it can easily cope with. Perhaps this should have been done with this bridge too ?
One article I read said there was a good likelihood the bridge was constructed using less concrete than specified
Sad if so - you'd really hope there would be final checks in place to prevent things like that from crippling a major building project!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
So the bridge is 0.8 * X strong. How big is X? How big did X need to be?
A two-fold factor of safety is normal in projects like this, so if the bridge is 0.8 * X strong, it should still be 60% than it needs to be. And civil engineers tend to be a cautious lot; after several rounds of review of something like a bridge it tends to end up grossly over-designed as each engineer adds an additional margin of safety to the prior engineer's work. So there should be no way that a bridge that has lost 20% of its strength is dangerous.
So this raises a number of questions. Did the inspectors miss something? Was the bridge improperly designed for the load it was carrying? Was it not built according to the design? Those are all possibilities. It could be a combination of them.
The Kansas City Hyatt pedestrian bridge collapse was due to two factors. First, the original design did not meet building codes; but even so the design should have been able to support as many people on the bridge as could fit. Second, changes were made to the design as the bridges were constructed, such that the bridges could barely support their own weight. Now had the original design been as strong as the code called for, the disaster wouldn't have happened. Had it been built to the original, inadequate design, the disaster wouldn't have happened.
The point is disasters can be complicated affairs involving many errors. While in this case the rust no doubt contributed to the failure, it may not be the only thing that went wrong.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
The bridge's sorry state was known years ago. A certain political party used the "environmentalist" demagoguery to keep the status quo.
And now the same people are blaming the company that built and maintained the structure:
Because the government is so good at everything...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
It's much more fun to jump on the bandwagon then to heed reason and empirical observation.
If Twitter is good enough for Elon musk to design a rescue system for stranded children in a cave, it must be good enough to solve any "mistery"---even this one.
Many highways in Italy are run by for-profit commercial companies. It is in the corporation's fiscal interests to sacrifice the public's safety in search of greater profits -- so the public is put at risk.
Most times the additional risk doesn't matter; this time it did.
That is why countries with common sense does not privatize critical public services like roads, health care, the fire/police departments, etc. When you introduce the profit motive into the equation, all sorts of bad things happen despite what Libertarians and others claim.
The final checkers would be threatened or bribed.
... or reduce the speed"
I'm having trouble figuring out how a reduce speed would reduce the load on a bridge. Anybody have an idea how that works?
This is what an earlier poster was referring to with the observation that "the construction companies made some 'equivalent substitutions'". These sorts of shenanigans are SOP in Italian civil works projects, you just get used to it after awhile.
It is a nearly universal law of politics and government that politicians LOVE to spend money on shiny new stuff and ribbon cutting ceremonies. They LOVE to claim credit for bringing their people new, bright-and-shiny, sparkly new benefits, machines, buildings, parks, dams, bridges, and other infrastructure.
It is also a nearly universal law of politics and government that politicians HATE to spend money on old utilitarian stuff the public either never sees or sees so often that they take it for granted.
The result: New stuff gets built, but once built its maintenance begins to be neglected and that neglect eventually dwindles toward zero. Eventually that new stuff becomes old stuff that will never get adequate attention until it fails in a catastrophic way that kills a bunch of people, or until something similar fails that way and the politicians panic enough to briefly spend a pile of money on maintenance on all similar things to the one that failed - after which the neglect resumes.
It may make the trains run on time, but it also makes cars fall from the sky.
Italy is India of europe
Like all other products that are being built in modern world, planned obsolescence has been built into buildings, and bridges
Many bridges that we use daily, many skyscrapers which millions and millions of people work in, the cars we drives, the planes we fly in, the trains we ride, have planned vulnerability built in
This bridge will not be the only one which failed. More buildings will fall, bridges break, in the coming days, weeks, months and years
Happy living
The universe is entropic (tending toward higher entropy - lower organization)
Stuff breaks down.
You don't need to plan to have things fail. They will fail by default.
All you need is insufficient planning, budget, and execution of how to make them last unexpectedly long.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?