You've got to be kidding me....

[kyburg]

A highway bridge collapsed with a thunderous roar, hurling vehicles into the Mississippi River in central Minneapolis during evening rush hour on Wednesday and killing at least three people, officials and media said.

August isn't even 24 hours old. It's going to be a long one.

Holy chrome.

Comments

[sputnik.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'm just hoping this is simply structural failure rather than something else. It'll certainly make states get out there and do a better job of inspections.

Tragic

[ivymcallister.livejournal.com]

yffy and I seem to have a particularly bad time with the months of September through November, so we've taken to calling them Sucktember, Fucktober and No(more)vember. Since Sucktember seems to have come early this year, we're considering adding August to the series and referring it as Ughust.

[elorie.livejournal.com]

Read the whole article. They saw fatigue cracks in *2006*.

My father was a civil engineer for the Georgia Department of Transportation. Part of his job was was make sure that the bridges were made according to specifications....one of the contractors' favorite tricks was to put to much sand into the concrete mix. It was cheaper for them, but meant that the concrete wouldn't stand up to temperature fluctuations or normal stresses as well. My father was notorious for making people rip stuff out and do it over if it didn't pass the pit tests he did.

Now, that bridge was built in 1967, which means it was 40 years old, so I'm not saying that they built it wrong. I'm just saying that bridges are built within a *tolerance* for certain conditions. Minnesota has far larger temperature fluctuations than Georgia, and if they noticed fatigue cracks and BENDING on it last year they should have jumped right on that.

[sputnik.livejournal.com]

I totally agree. I did skim. I do that.

[tibicina.livejournal.com]

To be fair, it was in the process of being reconstructed and they'd been working on that for months. So I am guessing that they started the reconstruction stuff not long after they noticed said cracks. They just didn't get it all done fast enough. Or at least that's the take I was hearing on what happened.

[digiamy.livejournal.com]

Actually the construction work that was being done was resurfacing the traffic lanes and replacing guard rails. They weren't doing any structural work.