Pony

MINNEAPOLIS - An interstate bridge suddenly broke into huge sections and collapsed into the Mississippi River during bumper-to-bumper traffic Wednesday, killing at least six people and sending vehicles, tons of concrete and twisted metal crashing into the water.


Jamie Winegar of Houston said she was sitting in traffic when all of a sudden she started hearing "boom, boom, boom and we were just dropping, dropping, dropping, dropping."

Homeland Security Department spokesman Russ Knocke also said the collapse did not appear to be terrorism-related.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070802/...ridge_collapse

Maz

Have been following this all evening. Absolutely awful! Up to 7 deaths now.

Deedee13

the most frightening is we use that one every day getting to and from the training centre....!! it was a big reality check!

Redlippie

OMG! That is so scary Dee.!

teambwr47

Watched the coverage just after the collapse on Sky News and my thoughts go out to all those affected by this awful incident not just those lost and injured but also the 911 services who have to deal with the awful circumstances.

Makes you wonder about other bridges i know of which have known problems and are being worked on to strengthen and lengthen their useable life. I remember being advised that i and my colleagues were not allowed to stop on the hard shoulder of a large UK motorway overbridge and under no circumstances were heavy loads to stop on the same area due to known weaknesses that were being worked on at the time. The bridge concerned stayed fully open throughout the work.

Rushman

In a country thats roads are built to a lesser level than the Romans did we really expect the bridges to be built any better?

Leslie

paddingtongreen

Typically, another remark offered from a posture of ignorance. The bridge was state of the art when it was built. Bridges of that ilk have developed some fatigue problems that were unknown in that type of structure, in the era when they were built, but no one knows, yet, why this one collapsed.

You get the roads that the general public will pay for. Did you ever see a politician elected when running on a "Let's build better, more expensive, roads" platform?

It takes a catastrophe for the great unwashed to want to spend money on the infrastructure, if they don't feel threatened they don't want to pay the freight.

snowbunny

Wasn't Katrina enough?

The bridges built in the 60s did not anticipate traffic jams in which there was start/stop traffic and a constantly heavy load. The typical load of today is heavier than that of the 60s (due to the rise in trucking loads mainly).

paddingtongreen

Katrina was a naturally occurring event, I was thinking of a bridge collapse like the Connecticut Turnpike bridge over the Mianus River. The NE states found money for a review, repair and upgrade of bridges after that one, because the public was scared and didn't resist spending the tax money.

I did a little bridge design in the sixties and then none until about seven years ago. I was surprised to find that for the shorter bridges, the newer HS20 loading didn't need more strength. While the axle loads were greater, the trucks were longer, so there were less axles on the bridge. The main change was in the horizontal loads, in line and lateral, they had become important.

Hiro11

I remember reading about that very fact while they were tearing down the old elevated central artery in Boston. The roadway was basically at or above its designed weight capacity basically all day every day for decades...

Add the freeze/thaw cycle of the cold climate and the constant salting of the roads in MN... it's not hard to imagine what happened.

Also, 52 kids were on a school bus on the bridge when it collapsed. the bus fell 30 feet Thank God, they're all OK...
http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/08/02/bri...bus/index.html

Tootsie Frickensprinkles

Still over 30 missing, when or if they find the cars, they are going to be pulling bodies from them

snowbunny

While yes, Katrina was a natural disaster, the failure of the levees due to flooding was a classic example of what happens when infrastructure goes neglected, even when there are reports that state that there is a high possibility of failure. People don't read "70% chance of failure," they see "30% chance of no failure."

As I noted elsewhere bridges are built by design to certain conditions that may not lend themselves well to changes in the forces exerted upon them. I find it disheartening that we've gone from the 60s, where scientists were listened to keenly as we raced for the moon, to now, where scientists and engineers are considered to be rumour-mongers and are ignored when it comes to "inconvenient truths."

Manc

It's absolutely terrorism related...........

When you send billions on phoney wars and chasing people in the mountains of Tora Bora, compounded by this countries obsession with keeping taxes as low as possible.......

it doesn't leave much to keep the infrastructure upto date.

Pony

good point

Rep. James Oberstar, the Minnesota Democrat who chairs the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, blamed President George W. Bush's administration for shortchanging road and bridge repair in a highway funding bill two years ago.
Bush, he said, "failed to support a robust investment in surface transportation," adding the president insisted on only $2 billion a year for bridge reconstruction when lawmakers were pushing for $3 billion a year.




A 2005 report by the American Society of Civil Engineers gave the country's infrastructure an unacceptable D grade -- almost failing. The group estimated the United States needed to spend $1.6 trillion over five years to put its infrastructure into good shape. - So no invasions for a couple of years and the job is sorted!

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070802/...structure_dc_1