Poor design led to I-35W bridge collapse?

No, it is not the next step. Your suggestion will still not "work" if politicians don't fund maintenance or fund it in such a way that adequate maintenance gets done. You will find that these failures will have a history of graft and gross mismanagement of funding. Track the events and problems with a construction project known as the Big Dig in Massachusetts.

Throwing money at this problem is not going to solve it; it will increase the incidence of events.

/BAH

Agreed. Lengthening a pin, by itself, will weaken a pin, not make it stronger for the same diameter.

Of course you see what I obviously meant, mentioned also in earlier remarks :

To me it appears a sound old structure does not materially lose its structural strength,stiffness or stability and fall off just by weathering or continous use _within the designed ife span of the bridge or structure._.

There must be a priori a designed or declared life span.

You seem to believe that lifespans can be 1. accurate and 2. unadmendable.

You are wrong. Things wear out with use and exposure. The reason most things don't fail is because stuff gets fixed when they break a little rather than when they are so broken a replacement is required. Even foot paths require monthly maintenance; you pull the weeds.

Go look at some bridges. STop thinking and see for yourself. Also note bridges that don't look like bridges. These usually go over streams.

You have noticed that bridge was designed and built for two lanes and it is now has 8 lanes?

/BAH

Fred, you followed your one liner with two or three pages of quoted message......

But yes, the investigators are not thrilled by the detail design here

Brian W

Very amusing. Preceding it with two pages of quotes, not so much.

Brian W

You're certain of the two lanes? It's hard to believe that a bridge built for an Interstate highway that had (at least) four lanes on both sides of it was built for only two lanes.

Dear Everett M. Greene:

"Everett M. Greene" wrote >

The bridge there before this one was two lanes (one each way). This one was designed for 4 lanes. It was retrofitted to 6 lanes, and restriped to 8 lanes. Links previously provided.

David A. Smith

No.

An Interstate built in the 1950s had four lanes each way? I never saw that on land and definitely never with a bridge.

/BAH

Notice that everyone has been talking about I35W having been built in the 60s. It was definitely a minimum of two lanes each way from day 1.

I meant the bridge or bldg has aged with needed/mandatory repairs carried out from time to time, which procedure should keep the structure still in a serviceable condition at the end of designed service life.

Narasimham

I thought the bridge was one-way traffic. So that would make it two lanes, later changed to four.

/BAH

The problem was that the bridge was not maintained. The real problem is politicians not funding maintenance. You can put in all the whizzy sexy warning devices money can make but the real problem will still not be addressed nor fixed.

/BAH

--------------- let me tell you again: th efart it was dolding on 40 years menas that the desighn was reasonable from load calculations aspect may be they ddint took in acount the right measures againt corrosion th eothers factor that i stoo pften occures is bad mainenence aginst corrosion

and the best thing to do is building more concrete bridges (th e steel companies want like to hear it .......)

Y.Porat

-------------------------

On Aug 21, 4:09 am, "Y.Porat" wrote: ...

Concrete bridges use steel rebar for strength at low mass. Although the concrete does provide some chemical buffering, it does not make the interior steel less prone to corrosion. Concrete is prone to brittle failure, is more difficult to non-invasively inspect, and is more difficult to repair.

There is no substitute for maintenance. A monolithic structure (like a concrete span) can provide an excuse for not looking.

David A. Smith

They can't garner votes by spending money on invisible maintenance. That leads them to build more roads and bridges, all at lowest bid and lowest possible budget, where deterioration is fastest. But that helps them get votes in the next election.

Perhaps the infrastructure decision makers should be appointed for life, like federal judges, but with the caveat that once they accept the job they will never hold any other governmental position.

(For obvious reasons I would also like the change that once a prosecutor a person can never hold any governmental position outside the judicial department.)

But it's not invisible. There is scaffolding and slower traffic and two-legged critters in hard hats around when that maintenance is done.

hah. You haven't studied the Big Dig. That was not "lowest possible budget".

That's a bad idea...at least around here. The population would slowly accumulate people who can't do the work or don't want to do the work or simply don't show up.

How many Presidents would not have been if that were the case?

It is still a bad idea. The capable would never be available for appts. so a pool of talent couldn't be used.

I haven't a solution; from what I've read, unproductive graft appears to be a cycle.

/BAH

You call that visible, I don't. I call a new highway or a new ramp on an existing highway "visible". Repairs are a temporary inconvenience we all want to forget, but a new highway.....well, that's brought up at election time. The new stuff is visible, repairs and maintenance are not, IMO.

Sorry, you're looking through the wrong end of the proverbial telescope. Budgets are created at the beginning of a project, and the bid is awarded to the lowest bidder, funded via the lowest possible budget. I didn't follow the Big Dig but I'll bet you a cup of coffee that overruns and supplementary funding is what *really* cost the taxpayers, not the original budget.

So how is that so different from the civil servants you presently have? I'd like to have the decision functions moved from politicians whose only goal is the next election to professionals who are safe in a career, safe to make the right decisions.

Since WW2, Truman and Eisenhower definitely weren't, but coincidentally were the best two presidents in my lifetime. JFK, probably the most popular in my lifetime, also was not a lawyer.

In fact, if you look at the subject of POTUS education in wikipedia you'll find that only 5 presidents completed law school and graduated. 6 others got involved but for a variety of reasons, never graduated.

s/used/misused

Cycle implies there's a wane in there somewhere.

The last new highway in Michigan put a lot of farmers out of business. That was visible and resented.

Maintenance of Rt. 495 in Mass. is always visible, especially after they are done and you don't have to look for potholes and feel your steering wheel jiggle.

There is a little bit of difference betweeen $2 billion and $15 billion, still counting.

Union.

And whose only method of getting more money (remember, you've restricted their job advancement opportunities) is to acquire it from the backend. You were talking about lifetime appts.

Yes. There are. Recessions, depressions, wars, and pandemics.

/BAH