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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

#131

Post by buildbot »

rapsey wrote: post #17
m2f2 wrote: post #8

Same stuff for the Genoa, Italy bridge (Ponte Morandi). Everyone running on that would feel vibrations and "repairs" were just lipstick on a ugly face, until it finally collapsed, with 43 dead. Surprisingly, or not so, no one was found guilty, not even the inspectors that didn't report the ongoing damages, just because "it would be too costly to rebuild it, and profits of the highway company (1) in charge of it would…

Yet Italy spent years trying to put Adrian Newey in jail for building an f1 car involved in a fatal crash.

Yeah don’t get involved in the Italian “justice” system. For another example, the still ongoing prosecution of Amanda Knox.

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

#132

Post by buildbot »

throwaway211 wrote: post #91
tiagod wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a suspension bridge. And a solid one :) Takes 6 lanes of traffic and whole trains on the bottom.

Trains cross bridges easily as they're either balanced with each half on each side, or half on and half on ground. And other time's just between these stable points. Furthermore, trains run on tracks which reduces chance of turning acceleration.

Unless it’s a floating bridge…

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

#133

Post by lupusreal »

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?

Everything is bigger in Texas, particularly claims about how big Texas is.

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

#134

Post by FredPret »

ak217 wrote: post #119
FredPret wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be ideal if US allies would spend more on their militaries, but the last time a US President insisted on that he was mocked mercilessly. But contrary to popular belief, the MIC isn’t that fat. They are mostly public companies - you can check out their profits yourself. Here’s one: https://valustox.com/NOC Their margins tend to be small. Their revenues are incredibly steady (they’re pretty much government dep…

The military is not exactly ready for war, though. Shipbuilding capacity is greatly diminished and the Navy has massive issues with most of its design and procurement programs. Other services have issues too, though not as severe. The military is in desperate need of more new contractors like Anduril and SpaceX to provide competition for the incumbents, as well as stronger collaboration with allies like having Japane…

Anduril and SpaceX will probably be very good for the MIC. But the incumbents aren't doing too badly - they're currently supplying a proxy war against one of the US's major rivals.

The programs and systems may not be perfect but at least there are programs and systems.

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

#135

Post by dmurray »

Sharlin wrote: post #59
amanaplanacanal wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, that sounds really strange. Not sure how it is elsewhere in Europe, but in Finland whoever builds it, maintains it. Intercity road and rail networks are all owned and managed by the state, and that’s actually how the equivalents of "road" and "street" are defined within the field: anything owned by the state is a road, anything owned by the municipality is a street. In recent years there have been plans to "bou…

Finland joined the EU too late and too rich, perhaps. In other countries the EU was the main source of funds for building motorways, but doesn't own them or maintain them.

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

#136

Post by pessimizer »

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…

I think this leans on a thing that I think of as the "law of average quality." The belief that there's some mark, near the middle, and things below that mark are bad, and things above that mark are good. It's something that is only true if you're comparing things against themselves. If there are any external goals for the things being discussed, almost everything can be bad (and correspondingly, almost everything can be good.)

I feel like this thought process leads to the "worst possible category" containing 42k bridges. The construction of the categories was based around whether the bridge is safe, and this category says "the bridge is not safe." It's when you put it off long enough, and let the infrastructure deteriorate long enough, that you start going "which is the most unsafe though?" Or, "is a safety factor even necessary? They are by definition a >1.0 factor applied to what we think is safe." Then, "one in a hundred year events" or "once in a decade events." Eventually it's "hasn't collapsed yet!"

The fact that the list got that big means our problem isn't prioritization, our problem is failing to repair bridges. Commit to and budget for repairing 42k bridges, then prioritize where you start.

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

#137

Post by chiph »

To prevent this from happening in the future, I would give the inspectors the right to immediately close a bridge when it got to be this bad. If the owner forcibly reopened it, they would lose any insurance coverage on it (be totally liable for consequences).

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

#138

Post by arp242 »

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…

Infrastructure maintenance was quite a big issue during the 2015 US election. I'm not sure the Trump administration actually did anything about it – I don't really follow US politics that closely. My point is: people do care.

I think the bigger problem is maintenance is just one cost out of many. There's also education, and health care, and social services, and police, and firemen, and pensions, and all sorts of other things, and that's also important. It's relatively easy to "save" on maintenance because nothing is going to fall down immediately and no one will really notice – at least not for a while. In the long run you're not really saving anything of course.

It's easy to critique this from the sidelines, but the pressures politicians and governments are under make it pretty tricky to do anything else. Saving money in other areas is going to be unpopular. Raising taxes even more so. A lot of times stuff like this is a Kobayashi Maru.

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

#139

Post by michaelt »

francisofascii wrote: post #78
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…

It should be mentioned that structurally deficient does not mean unsafe.

So the industry's rating system maps this bridge - totally fucked, key structural members rusted away entirely, others with large, clearly visible holes right through important points, weakened to the point it ended up falling down - to "structurally deficient" and then maps "structurally deficient" to "not necessarily unsafe" ?

Kinda makes me think George Carlin was on to something with his hate of soft, euphemistic language.

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

#140

Post by simple10 »

chiph wrote: post #137

To prevent this from happening in the future, I would give the inspectors the right to immediately close a bridge when it got to be this bad. If the owner forcibly reopened it, they would lose any insurance coverage on it (be totally liable for consequences).

This seems reasonable, but there's also the concern of abuse of power. Like when the mob or politicians had control of local labor unions and inspectors on payroll. They would force closures of bridges, roads, building, etc to hire mob run construction companies to do the repairs. Maybe there are enough federal safeguards in place for this now at DOT (Department of Transportation) level.
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