The Ed Schitz comment is an example of how lefties think…use a horrible situation where hundreds or thousands are suffering as an political opportunity. Shameless moron. Bad Schitz!

God bless you and thank you for your service.

Glad to see HotAir got the memo…

There is a right way to address this problem, and that is to invest in R&D and technology that will allow potential catastrophic failures to be identified sooner, easier and cheaper. Will prevent all disasters like this? No, of course not.

But neither will the alternative, Democrat, solution, which will be to dole out enormous sums of money as political prizes to labor unions in well-connected congressional districts and states, randomly reinforcing or rebuilding countless bridges which are minimal safety risks.

The difference is that the technological approach is a lot more cost effective, and probably also more effective at reducing real safety problems.

You cannot completely prevent any bridge, somewhere in America, from ever collapsing, at least not a cost that makes any sense. Suppose we double the Federal Highway Management Agency’s budget by adding $50B/year. Assuming the money can actually spent to do something useful, you would then, best case, halve the rate of failures by inspecting/repairing twice as many bridges every year. Disasters like the one in MSP happen at the rate of 1 or 2 per decade. So you are spending half a trillion dollars extra over 10 years to save, maybe, 25 lives. Of course, there are other costs in terms of the economy, but still, there are a lot of ways to save more than a couple dozen lives with half a trillion dollars – reduce air pollution,
medical research, improve automobile safety, put more police on the street, train more nurses, etc.

We are already spending close to $50B/year in federal money on maintenance of highways and bridges – that’s $1B/state, which is pretty sizable compared to the average state government budget.

It makes a lot more sense to me to improve the technology so that money (and whatever more is really needed to address significant safety risks) is used better (where it is needed), rather than throwing more of it at the problem in a hit or miss fashion that wastes a significant fraction of it.

I mean, there are some major roads that should not be drivable, I feel like my car’s suspension would collapse on US23.

The bridge inspectors in Pittsburgh must feel more secure about their jobs…

Yea, I think you are right, looking at the first frame the arch (on the far side of the river) looks not so much kinked as twisted and deformed. In fact if you play the first two frames back and forth several times you can see what to my untrained eye appears to be a section of the arch across the river sheering as the road deck begins to fall.

the Strib, ominously, reports 20 people are missing.

That’s probably the number of illegals working on the bridge at the time of the collapse.

We only get a glimpse but traffic doesn’t appear to be bumper to bumper, contrary to the reports yesterday.

Yeah, it became clear that “bumper to bumper” was BS very earlier, otherwise we’d have hundreds dead and injured, the bridge was something like 480 feet long wasn’t it?

Anyway, I say controlled demolition. I’m going to see if Alex Jones and a bunch of bored dumb ass kids in their dorms can tell me if it fell in proper free fall time, if there are visible explosions, and teach me about physics even though not a single physicist will agree with them. Be afraid Council on Foreign Relations, we’ve got you in our cross hairs on this one!

I agree that pulling off the seat at the support would be consitent with the failure we see in the video.

Star Trib says NTSB is looking at vibration and fatigue failure, presumably at the support.

Freeze the second frame and look at the line created by the bridge deck. There is a “kink” in the span, which is where all the rotation is taking place.

When I first watched it, I had the impression the collapse started from the right. But the right side of the frame is much closer to the camera, and the center of the bridge, which is a lot farther away, falls a considerable distance between the first and second frames.

Actually, in the *first* frame it looks to me like the bottom strut has already failed in the center of the bridge. Follow the arc of the bottom arch, rather than looking at the roadway. There looks like a kink in arch in the first frame, before the roadway below it starts to fall in the second frame.

The video is, I think, shot at 4 frames/second. If the bridge started to free-fall when frame 1 was shot, it would only drop about a foot before frame 2. The fact that it seems to fall a lot more suggests to me it was already coming down in frame 1.

It’s all about priorities, and no one seems focused on the problem, least of all the states themselves. Routine maintenance and rehab isn’t sexy enough, but that’s what keeps the infrastructure going.

If you look at the frontpage photo from yesterday, there is another span to the right and off-camera. From photos in the queue that Lileks linked to last night and the action seen on the video, I think the girders span the right support.

If the failure was in the span off-camera, the moment forces might cause enough displacement to pull the span on-camera off of its left support, which by the look of it was just roller connection. The failure off-camera would explain the girder buckling you note, a buckling that would also contribute to the displacement at the left end of the span.

It doesn’t look like terrorism, but Homeland Security seems to be able to rule out terrorism within an hour of any incident.

I believe the statement was to effect: we have no evidence of a connection to terrorism at this time.

IMO, when something like this happens, it is more prudent to tell people what you know, which in this is “we haven’t seen anything to make us think it’s terrorism”, than to conceal information (or lack thereof) and leaving the entire country to guess.

If there were any grounds to suspect terrorism in this case, it would have implied taking a lot of expensive precautions to guard similar structures, given AQ’s favored tactic of hitting multiple targets simultaneously. By telling people there was no evidence of terrorism, they probably saved the taxpayers millions of dollars.

You are correct Catseye – one end did start falling first but then the other end dropped quickly without pivoting.

Freeze the second frame and look at the line created by the bridge deck. There is a “kink” in the span, which is where all the rotation is taking place.

We have a bunch of big overpass projects going on here in FL and sometimes it looks like they are put together about as well as a child stacking blocks. We have afternoon storms that most people would mistake for hurricanes, so I *assume* they are built to some sort of standard…

For 15-20 minutes we waited to see emergency services move in. It took time and even longer for the water rescue to get on station. Watching them negotiate the wreckage was painful to watch. Brave souls.

In true Minnesotan fashion average Joes and Janes volunteers started grabbing the injured and taking them to hospitals almost immediately. Many of whom had rushed to the accident on foot.

At the very moment the bridge went down a fully loaded train was crossing under the structure and it was just barely past rush hour. In 2005 a report listed the bridge as deficient. The U of M had been involved studying the bridge and report. That stress test involved stacking sand filled dump trucks on key placements. I have yet to hear if any of the beams were x-rayed and to make matters worst the steal is painted which greatly screws with the engineers visual inspections.

It was built in the same year (1967) as the Ohio Silver bridge. Which went down in an eerily similar fashion.

A University of Minnesota Civil Engineer in a report to MN-DOT recently noted that this bridge is considered to be a non-redundant structure. That is, if any one member fails, the entire bridge can collapse. A key factor is that there are only four pylons holding up the arch. Any damage to any one pylon would be catastropic. The textbook example of a non-redundant bridge is the Silver Bridge over the Ohio River. It failed shortly before Christmas in 1967 resulting in 46 deaths. A single piece of hardware failed due to a tiny manufacturing defect. But that piece was non-redundant, and the entire bridge collapsed into the icy river. Today, bridge engineers design bridges so that any single piece of the bridge can fail without causing the entire bridge to collapse. It is tragic that the I-35W bridge was built a few years too early to benefit from that lesson.

With as many workers and engineers as there were working daily on the struture, Muslim terrorism is unlikely but can not be ruled out.

It also pales in comparrison with the Hinckley Fire. Following an extended drought, up to 1,000 burned alive, 400+ square miles burned to the ground. Fire speeds were at one point so great that it almost overtook one train. I only mention this because I’m fricking tired of hearing Twin Citie media dweebs calling the bridge’s collapse as one of the largest Minnesota disasters.

Having gone over the bridge hundreds of times gives no validity to my opinon but it appears it was just the bridge’s time. The pure miracle is the low number of deaths.

Engineers are genetically predispositioned to be allergic to stainless steel, which was discovered after we started wearing them. [One cynic has interpreted this true fact as “engineers like things that rust because rusty things need an engineer to design a replacement for it’, but that’s rubbish.)

So, we gave up the rings for a process of passing work through a enough design engineers that the factor of safety eliminates failure for all causes except nature. See ASCE CYA Code, Paragraph 3.1.2.8.4.2, the part in small print.

rockbend on August 2, 2007 at 9:13 AM

Actually, if you stop the video as the motion starts, it appears that the near end has a bout a 2 maybe 3 degree lead. If it’s already unsound, underload I’m sure that would be enough to cause the opposite end to collapse.

Twoother outrage in 3…2…1…