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Bridge collapse in Minneapolis
MKR
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/08/01/bridge.collapse/
Map coordinates of the bridge: 44.979240, -93.244770
Anyone have any news on this?
Map coordinates of the bridge: 44.979240, -93.244770
Anyone have any news on this?
MKR on
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Posts
Minnesota, but the bridge goes over the Mississippi river.
Does it make a sound?
"Kersploosh"
I'm pretty sure the 100 cars on the bridge at the time heard it.
What's left of them, anyway.
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They had a full hour to come up with something for this. Think they'll have something?
Oh wow.
And then I realized I'm a bad person.
And that I'm reading way too much Harry Potter.
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I don't drive over that bridge often, only to get to the airport. I do drive over another bridge over the Mississippi river on my way to work though.
Probably has nothing to do with the construction because it was just resurfacing as far as I know right now. The vibrations could have been what caused the collapse, but the leading idea was that the steel frame already had stress cracks in it.
Yeah. Stress was showing in the steel, they are suffering through an unusually heavy heat wave (and cooling off during night), and an abnormal traffic pattern..
I think it's gonna lead to some tightening up of the inspection process. With that said, the NTSB and the cities responded amazingly fast, and by the sounds of it amazingly well.
There's nothing unusual about the bridge design either, for the record.
It'd be nice, just for once, to have a blameless catastrophe.
Yes, I know that these things don't just naturally collapse. But if the bridge was 40 years old, built using older techniques that don't feature redundancy, and if nature herself caused it to collapse... Why blame someone?
Now, if the stress was enough (Why am I constantly thinking of Rosie O'Donnel's comments? ...), then yes... Let's ream the inspectors for not making a big enough deal of this. And let's ream the legislature for scaling back funding for road maintenance projects (another thing that I heard today, but is unsubstantiated at the moment). But it would make me happy to see something not be blamed on people, and yet everyone learns from it.
The piers are sort of far apart for a bridge that big, aren't they?
I forget the name of it, but there is a sort of bracing and connection point in the center that is used both to simplify load calculations and to ensure that stress vibrations won't lead to a bridges collapse. It isn't a new technique, either.
Maintenance, or lack thereof, is the most likely culprit. Will be interesting to see what it really is and what the investigations will do to improve future bridge safety.
They resurfaced the Riverside Expressway in my town late last year, and the heat from the new asphalt caused a crack in one of the on-ramps. They had to shut down the whole thing for a while to check for other structural faults, too. It was crazy, because that's the main route linking the south side of town, the CBD, and the northern and western suburbs
The structure is about the same age as this bridge, too, and almost entirely located directly over the Brisbane River. And my bus home uses it...
Wow, that must've been insane.
The article says the crack was caused by a failure of the bearings to shift their loads. Where did heat come in?
The article is a bit outdated, but it was briefly mentioned in the local paper (leaked from a council engineering report, IIRC) before the entire train of thought was Disappeared from the public dialogue. Having only one paper in town is not so rad... The resurfacing occurred right before the problem emerged though, so I'm pretty sure some expansion from the heat (occurring in such a way as to stuff up the ability of weight to shift effectively on that part of the on ramp, which has quite a distinct shape) was to blame for the crack.
Anyway, thread's not about me. The eyewitness reports I've read were pretty scary. I saw at least two people saying they were on the phone to someone on the bridge right when it collapsed
I n general - people like having someone to blame. It helps them make sense of a tragedy. There will be a head-hunt of epic proportions.
Also, it appears CNN has acquired a video of the collapse, and it's up on their website. Damn thing failed from the middle outwards.
This is kind of relevant to this area as Nebraska put a 5 ton weight limit on this bridge to "lengthen it's life span", but I always thougt it was to prevent it from plummeting into the Missouri. I wonder how many states are going to doublecheck their bridges after this.
This is a very big deal for the city. It's, from my understanding, the most heavily traveled bridge in Minneapolis and it serves at least a fourth of the population every day - if not more than that. It connects downtown to several suburbs, the University of Minnesota, and a few other areas.
Luckily nobody I knew was hurt, but it was scary for an hour or so following the disaster. My girlfriend was on her way here from the campus as it happened. She luckily took another route, but she could have just as likely been on the bridge as it happened. Another very good friend of mine was on her way towards the bridge, but the collapse occured about ten minutes before she got there.
coughcough....BIG DIG...coughcough. Us Bostonians...er, Bostonites...um, Bostonicans know all about that.
At this point I'm just trying not to obsess about the fact that my oldest friend in the world lives in Minneapolis, and I haven't been able to get in touch with her.
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I mean, aren't highway crews essentially resurfacing the roads in one direction, then driving back across the country and doing it again on like a 10 year cycle?
No, here in the United States, at least on the East Coast, a lot of stuff needs to be rebuilt.
I would say give her a call this morning.
It was pretty amazing though, thousands of people migrated to the area to help/watch. There were civilians directing traffic. People were jumping into the water, and down by the mississippi the bank is at least 10-20 feet above water.
I work down on the U campus and its very strange, nearly everyone I know takes that bridge home, or at least 2-3 times a week to get down town.
Thank god Pawlenty vetoed the road budget. :x