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Fern Hollow Bridge should have been closed years before it collapsed

practical.engineering

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Re: Fern Hollow Bridge should have been closed years before it collapsed

#121

Post by DangitBobby »

naasking wrote: post #85
shiroiushi wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They also tried to put a bunch of earthquake scientists in jail for not predicting an earthquake.

No, they were jailed because they reassured the population that there was no risk of earthquake, when there absolutely was. That's very different.

Still ridiculous, though. Do doctors in Italy go to jail for giving false negative cancer diagnoses? Can I sue the weather man when I get struck by lightning when they said there's no chance of rain? Maybe next time the public should interpret the seismographs themselves.

Edit: It was eventually overturned [1]. Still, a shocking indictment of the court system.

1. https://www.theverge.com/2014/11/11/7193391/italy-judges-cle...

Re: Fern Hollow Bridge should have been closed years before it collapsed

#122

Post by jon_richards »

bluish29 wrote: post #104
greggsy wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those states also have some of the fewest bridges, with the exception of Texas, which has the most of all states, and double the second place state (Ohio). That said, Ohio is 41 times smaller… So many ways to dice this information and I don’t even live in the US. https://www.statista.com/statistics/190386/number-of-road-br...

Texas is about 6 times bigger than Ohio. Texas is approximately 678,052 sq km, while Ohio is approximately 106,056 sq km. The population of Texas is around 25.1 million people compared to 11.5 million in Ohio, a difference of 13.6 million people. That means about 2 times population wise. I don't know by which size metric it is that ohio is 41 times smaller than texas?

Also texas has 683,533 lane miles of road vs ohio's 262,492 and a GDP of $2,563,508m vs ohio's $872,748m. Seems like they aren't putting that land mass to good use.

Re: Fern Hollow Bridge should have been closed years before it collapsed

#123

Post by p1mrx »

amanaplanacanal wrote: post #44
rob74 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A well-maintained (and well designed, but there's no reason to think the design was at fault here) bridge shouldn't collapse. Ever. "Appropriate maintenance" in this case would have been to periodically unclog the drains so the water can run off in a controlled fashion and not pool and corrode the supports. How expensive can that be? Instead, the bridge collapses (and they were lucky that no one was killed in the col…

I don’t know how things work in other countries, but in the US new construction is almost always funded with a big chunk of federal dollars (deficit spending), but maintenance has to be done out of your own state or local budget. The incentives are all fucked up.

Maybe we should spend federal dollars on stainless steel, to reduce maintenance costs.

Re: Fern Hollow Bridge should have been closed years before it collapsed

#124

Post by throwup238 »

ThinkBeat wrote: post #50

Many western countries in general do not care for routine maintenance of infrastructure / buildings / water lines / busses. Norway has to be among the worst. It is not fun and glorious for a political administration to set aside $$$$ every year that will just go to people doing boring work that the voters will not be impressed with. You dont see politicians "Under my administration we painted XX buildings, we did nee…

Bridge repair is further complicated by the United States’ form of government. The majority of the major bridges in poor condition in California (and most other states, I presume) were built with Federal highway funds which started drying up in the 1970s, leaving a huge hole in the finances for maintenance.

Since most income and business taxes go to the Federal government, states are dependent on Federal grants for a lot of infrastructure.

Re: Fern Hollow Bridge should have been closed years before it collapsed

#125

Post by hedora »

danielhep wrote: post #74
dmurray wrote: post #12

If you knew all this, would you have avoided driving over the bridge? Would you have wanted the local government to close it indefinitely awaiting repairs? Let's say it would collapse with 100% certainty randomly in the next three years, and you're in the danger area for 2 minutes, with a 20% chance of fatality (in fact, nobody died). That's still around a one in 4 million chance any given trip kills you, about the s…

Something I think you're missing here is that when the bridge collapses, cars can no longer drive across it until a new bridge is built, so the inconvenience is almost certainly much worse than if they'd just closed it for maintenance for a bit in the first place.

Also, it probably would have been a lot cheaper to have someone roto-rooter all the drains of all the bridges in Pittsburg once a year than to clean up one collapsed bridge and rebuild it on short notice. I suspect they have other bridges with similar water damage and have to pay to fix those too.

Re: Fern Hollow Bridge should have been closed years before it collapsed

#126

Post by eauxnguyen »

bombcar wrote: post #114
hi-v-rocknroll wrote: post #33

For context, there were 42,391 structurally deficient bridges in 2023.[0] 16 of the worst are in LA county and several see 300k trips daily, including one carrying the 405.[1] 0. PDF https://artbabridgereport.org/reports/2023-ARTBA-Bridge-Repo... 1. https://artbabridgereport.org/state/ranking/top-bridges EDIT: States with the least % of SD bridges: AZ, NV, TX, DE, and UT. WV and IA have the most at almost 20% SD brid…

This is actually part of the PROBLEM - with so many bridges on the "worst possible category" it becomes a bridge who cried wolf scenario. There is no way to highlight "yeah this one is going to fall down tomorrow" if the worst you can do is mark it "this bridge bad like 42k others". You need some form of a "stop ship" where inspectors get some number of "no way, close this entirely" that they can use without repercus…

There's a road near me that's been replaced by a large 4 lane state route. There's almost no reason to drive it as there are no houses or farm access. The bridge is being completely replaced. The road is closed during construction, and I think the only people impacted by it are the recreational bikers. A boondoggle while other bridges around the country are in dangerous disrepair. I wish we knew there was a sensible prioritization that was published for review by we the taxpayers.

Re: Fern Hollow Bridge should have been closed years before it collapsed

#127

Post by gp »

I used to walk across this bridge every day. You could feel whole bridge shake when heavy vehicles would drive over it (Lived in Reagent Square 2017 - 2019). I remember one morning I was trapped on the bridge for an hour in traffic on my drive to school because the city of Pittsburgh could not afford to keep the roads plowed.

Very thankful that nobody was hurt when it collapsed, and as other people have pointed out it is representative of all of the infrastructure that many cities have but can no longer afford to maintain or replace.

Re: Fern Hollow Bridge should have been closed years before it collapsed

#128

Post by cvz »

gp wrote: post #127

I used to walk across this bridge every day. You could feel whole bridge shake when heavy vehicles would drive over it (Lived in Reagent Square 2017 - 2019). I remember one morning I was trapped on the bridge for an hour in traffic on my drive to school because the city of Pittsburgh could not afford to keep the roads plowed. Very thankful that nobody was hurt when it collapsed, and as other people have pointed out i…

Unfortunately people were hurt, the good news is nobody died.

https://www.cbsnews.com/pittsburgh/news/completely-preventab...

Re: Fern Hollow Bridge should have been closed years before it collapsed

#129

Post by pintxo »

kube-system wrote: post #106
icegreentea2 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's rusty, and then there's "I can see daylight through the steel". I think most people can accurately diagnose that as an actual, real problem.

That isn't an uncommon sight around Pittsburgh. Whether or not it is an imminent structural issue depends on where the holes are.

This one settled it for me: https://youtu.be/J-VnWB4fiFk?si=BHg_ppZIAb2ykU2-&t=301

It's an important enough member to warrant 10 (I am assuming symmetry here, you cannot see all of them) not quite tiny bolts and nuts, but you can see clearly through the thing.

Re: Fern Hollow Bridge should have been closed years before it collapsed

#130

Post by jldugger »

jon_richards wrote: post #122
bluish29 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Texas is about 6 times bigger than Ohio. Texas is approximately 678,052 sq km, while Ohio is approximately 106,056 sq km. The population of Texas is around 25.1 million people compared to 11.5 million in Ohio, a difference of 13.6 million people. That means about 2 times population wise. I don't know by which size metric it is that ohio is 41 times smaller than texas?

Also texas has 683,533 lane miles of road vs ohio's 262,492 and a GDP of $2,563,508m vs ohio's $872,748m. Seems like they aren't putting that land mass to good use.

Annual Rainfall per square inch seems like a relevant factor though.
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