Bridge collapse

[timwinters]

Architects have been designing monuments to themselves for decades, if not centuries. God help us if engineers start doing the same.

 

[Old97]

Well it did look cool - i guess concrete is preferred in south Florida for the obvious reason of corrosion. I can see how it would be difficult to figure the shear capacity of those angled junctions.

 

[weilke]

Review engineer said there weren’t enough hours in the budget to review the truss nodes (where it failed).
I just think the design engineers outsmarted themselves. They went to a lot of trouble to make a cool-looking bridge that collapsed before they put anything on it.

It's called 'reinventing the wheel'. Instead of using one of the 10 or so designs for pedestrian bridges that highway administrations around the country buy as off the shelf items, they wanted to build themselves a monument. Oh, and it also had to fight climate change, that too.

That entire pylon with the diagonal stays that was supposed to make it look like a cable-stayed bridge. Yeah, all for show, had no structural function. The entire load of the bridge was supposed to be carried by the girder.

 

[ARFlyer]

It's called 'reinventing the wheel'. Instead of using one of the 10 or so designs for pedestrian bridges that highway administrations around the country buy as off the shelf items, they wanted to build themselves a monument. Oh, and it also had to fight climate change, that too.

That entire pylon with the diagonal stays that was supposed to make it look like a cable-stayed bridge. Yeah, all for show, had no structural function. The entire load of the bridge was supposed to be carried by the girder.

My father saw this first hand two weeks into his new job.

The TV station hired out to replace the guy wires on a 2000’ mast. When my father reported in as Director of Engineering he saw the name of the company and immediately told the higher up this company is know for shortcuts and reinventing the wheel on the fly. They dismissed his argument and two weeks later while the crew went to lunch the mast collapsed.

My father knew exactly what happened when he arrived at the scene but couldn’t do anything until the investigation was completed. They discovered the company had rigged a temporary guy using a lap splice held together by only four small u bolts to save time. The wind picked up and the splice slipped causing the top most mast section to violently swing out past the angle of no return.

If I remember correctly my father said a minimum of six u bolts were required on each section with a loop style splice.