Don -- Minneapolis road bridge collapse

I hope you are doing well, have you seen the site of the bridge collapse?

Minneapolis road bridge collapse

i

I do not see these things as related, personally, though this particular terrorist bridge is getting its share of water torture right now!

i

I haven't been to the site since the collapse, but there's been nothing else on local TV since it happened. It is one heckuvamess. Fortunately, I very seldom use that bridge.

Our thoughts and prayers are with those all affeceted by this tragic event.

No comment on politics, and the bridge was a terrible tragedy, but if we are going to discuss incompetence:

Alcohol is the leading cause of death for young people. Automobiles is the #1 cause of accidental death.

I can suggest other laws that can save more lives.

The integral de-icing system is interesting. Have you seen that on other bridges, Don?

Maybe it led to some kind of rot from within.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

There are probably more effective things than passing yet more laws.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

My heartfelt sympathies for the families of those persons injured or killed in that horrible accident.

It's just over one year from the day that concrete ceiling panel in a Boston "Big Dig" tunnel fell down and killed a woman passenger in a car being driven by her husband. The latest "blame placing" is on the conractors who used quick setting epoxy instead of "standard" stuff to glue in the vertically placed anchor bolts holding the damn thing up.

The idiocy continues... Now it's unsecured storm drain covers on a major highway here in Red Sox Nation. Several accidents involving them during the past week and one poor guy still in critical condition because 250 pounds of steel got thrown up by the tires of a truck ahead of his car and crashed through his windshield.

If I heard it correctly, work was being done on the road and trafic was diverted to flow on only the right lane and the breakdown lane. The storm drains were located on the breakdown lane, where traffic normally doesn't travel over them at high speeds.

Jeff

We have too many laws on the books now.......

.....what we need is stronger enforcement of existing laws.......

.....along with one new law that provides for the removal of an existing, archaic, non-enforcible law for every new law that is written into the books.

Same here, from the other Don in Minneapolis

My son uses that bridge. I was on pins and needles all night till I confirmed he was O.K. Cell phone service was down/jammed. Emergency crews were trying to communicate by cell also. This don't work in an emergency.

The one good thing to see out of this disaster was all the people that just jumped right in to help. Many stories of folks in the area taking extreme risk to help those in need seconds after the collapse.

Karl

You are not aware of this?

Open your eyes Grasshopper and as you travel during the day...pick something and do a mental analysis of how you would take something down.

Its rather frightening how much stuff has been built, that peoples lives depend on..that was built with the idea that there are no evil people in the world.

Gunner

On Thu, 02 Aug 2007 08:21:19 -0500, with neither quill nor qualm, Spehro Pefhany quickly quoth:

ANYTHING is more effective than passing more laws.

Larger fines and timeouts for stupidity (rear ending people, running off the road, driving way too slowly, sideswiping things while on the phone, reaching into the back seat to swat your monster kid while driving, etc. are all handled under "negligent driving." That's a current law.)

-- All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit. --Thomas Paine

The infamous US131 S-Curve in Grand Rapids MI has a similar system. It works most of the time. Sometimes it fires when there isn't any snow, sometimes the conditions overwhelm it, sometimes it doesn't do anything when it should... My two-cents, it's a waste of money :(

If you want more info (tech details) I'll do some searching for you. I suspect that Michigan's MDOT website may have some information/detail concerning it. They made quite a big thing over it when it was first installed around the year

2000.

As you travel down the freeway, particularly in slow traffic or in a traffic jam, particularly at a freeway interchange, where several freeways join together ...look at the over passes. Picture a couple non descript vans slamming to a stop on the overpass ahead of you, and

4 Islamofascists bailing out with AK-74s in hand along with a couple RPGs, then starting below them..shooting up the cars, creating a traffic jam, then proceeding to shoot and grenade all the cars on your side of the overpass, shooting up the cars out as far as they can see. The fences or concrete walls on both sides of the freeway prevents you or anyone from exiting, the traffic jam is locked solid and the bullets continue to fly. Even better. both of the vans have .50 machine guns mounted in their side doors and are spraying BIG bullets which can travel through multiple cars.

Your reaction would be? You would do what? How would you avoid being shot, burned by exploding cars or trampled by mobs of screaming, exploding passengers and drivers?

After 3 minutes..the terrorists simply drive off...and head for the next freeway interchange......

Can store a lot of linked .50 in a van...

Gunner

Rear ending isn't a good example. When some dimbo pulls out directly in front of you one can only shed velocity at a rate governed by reaction time and physics.

I've had a few too many views of passenger side quarter panel followed by rear bumper as I try to massage the boundary of Fc static and Fc sliding.

For some reason these idjits seem to scale my small car at night up to a bigger vehical and think they have enough room to pull in front of me with an empty road behind me.

Wes

An old friend of mine told a story about riding with his mother-in-law. She pulled out in front of a vehicle and he asked her "Didn't you see that guy coming?" To which she curtly replied, "Oh, He's got brakes!".

Years later she died in a head on crash on a four lane highway in a twisty area. I always wondered what really happened/caused the accident...

Just pray your brakes keep working and you aren't glancing around elsewhere when the next one pulls out.

I didn't even know that bridge had it until yesterday. They claim that it uses the same chemicals they routinely spread on roadways and bridges, but it may use more or do it more often. They do use a lot of chemicals here. Bridges can be problematic due to formation of black ice (frozen exhaust condensate) in very cold weather, even if there's no residual snow.

Question that occurs to this engineer (with no data) is: why now, in midsummer? Very hot,has been all summer, drought conditons. Traffic was extremely heavy and slow (10mph or so) and there was a train passing beneath that was cut in half by the falling bridge. Traffic backup caused to some extent by construction (and consequent congestion) both further north and further south on I35-W. Makes me wonder if some sort of unsuspected/unexpected resonance condition could have been created that shook the bridge apart. That bridge was built 40 years ago, long before the sophisticated FEA computer models we have today. Traffic density like that did not happen here in

1967. In those days, one could get from anywhere to anywhere else in the metro area in about 20 minutes except right after a major snowstorm. Now, the northbound lane of 35W and 35 north of there is a parkinglot nearly to Forest Lake after about 4 PM. Forest lake is about 25 miles north of that bridge.

Pure speculation, of course. I expect it'll be awhile before they figure it out, and figure out why the incipient fault was undetected by recent inspections.

If I could make a guess, I would say that bad welds that deteriorated over time, are the most likely culprits.

i