Thoughts go out to those in the area that may have loved ones involved. Hope everyone is safe and sound.
My brother-in-law and his friend crossed the bridge literally <1 minute before it collapsed and watched it fall in his rear view mirror. Scary.
Glad your family is safe! Had to be a very scarry thing to watch happen behind you.
I have friends in the area and have heard from one, she is ok. Still do not know about any of the others…sit and wait time I guess.
The first of many collapses to come in the next couple years.
[quote]Donut62 wrote:
The first of many collapses to come in the next couple years.[/quote]
Man…that’s really scary. I really feel for anyone who loses a family member, especially when so unexpected.
It is a good time to be a Structural Engineer.
Or is it?
[quote]Chewie wrote:
It is a good time to be a Structural Engineer.
[/quote]
Or on a search and rescue team.
[quote]Donut62 wrote:
The first of many collapses to come in the next couple years.[/quote]
I hope not. This country needs to wake up to the aging infrastructure problem.
[quote]Chewie wrote:
It is a good time to be a Structural Engineer.
Or is it? [/quote]
I am a civil engineer who works with bridges. This thing was designed in the early 60’s for roughly 1/4 of the volume of traffic it now experiences. It had nothing to do with the design.
It was noted by inspectors several years ago that the superstructure was structurally deficient (I forget the number of interstate highway system bridges that have this rating, but I believe it is around 25%). It was noted that connection plates were experiences fatigue cracking, and in a truss, when one connection fails everything does.
MNDOT was on it’s hand and knees begging for money to fix it, they were ignored, and will now probably have the blame pushed onto them. It’s pretty much a daily routine for state bridge engineers.
Before I had my current job in the private sector I interned for 2 years with the state department of transportation, and if people saw the daily correspondance between the structural offices and the field inspectors there would be mass hysteria. You ask for money to fix this, congress gets it, but they have it ear marked for their own pet projects and the people who know what they are doing are left with 5 pounds of shit to shove in a 10 pound sack.
“What? Bridge might kill hundreds? You need $10 million? OK, here’s $10 million, but $3 million goes to build a library with my name on it, $2 million goes to build a spawning pool so purple mountain spotted tadpoles can grow.”
This is the type of incident to wake people up, it’s just unfortunate that so people have to die everytime America needs it.
Oklahoma, my home state, has some of the worst bridges in the country; they’re all so old and structurally deficient.
Our state legislators have just looked the other way and prayed that they wouldn’t fall. The Minnesota bridge was a tragedy, but hopefully it’ll shake our legislators to their senses and they’ll start funding bridge repair.
What happened in Minnesota could very easily happen in Oklahoma tomorrow.
It’s one hell of a mess here. I was two miles away from crossing that bridge when it went down.
[quote]Donut62 wrote:
Chewie wrote:
It is a good time to be a Structural Engineer.
Or is it?
I am a civil engineer who works with bridges. This thing was designed in the early 60’s for roughly 1/4 of the volume of traffic it now experiences. It had nothing to do with the design.
It was noted by inspectors several years ago that the superstructure was structurally deficient (I forget the number of interstate highway system bridges that have this rating, but I believe it is around 25%). It was noted that connection plates were experiences fatigue cracking, and in a truss, when one connection fails everything does.
MNDOT was on it’s hand and knees begging for money to fix it, they were ignored, and will now probably have the blame pushed onto them. It’s pretty much a daily routine for state bridge engineers.
Before I had my current job in the private sector I interned for 2 years with the state department of transportation, and if people saw the daily correspondance between the structural offices and the field inspectors there would be mass hysteria. You ask for money to fix this, congress gets it, but they have it ear marked for their own pet projects and the people who know what they are doing are left with 5 pounds of shit to shove in a 10 pound sack.
“What? Bridge might kill hundreds? You need $10 million? OK, here’s $10 million, but $3 million goes to build a library with my name on it, $2 million goes to build a spawning pool so purple mountain spotted tadpoles can grow.”
This is the type of incident to wake people up, it’s just unfortunate that so people have to die everytime America needs it.
[/quote]
Coming from your inside perspective, that is truly frightening.
[quote]tGunslinger wrote:
Oklahoma, my home state, has some of the worst bridges in the country; they’re all so old and structurally deficient.
Our state legislators have just looked the other way and prayed that they wouldn’t fall. The Minnesota bridge was a tragedy, but hopefully it’ll shake our legislators to their senses and they’ll start funding bridge repair.
What happened in Minnesota could very easily happen in Oklahoma tomorrow.[/quote]
Yeah, it’s everywhere. If the I-71/75 bridge in Cincinnati doesn’t fall into the Ohio River before it is replaced it will honestly be one of the most miraculous events in structural engineering history.
[quote]Donut62 wrote:
Chewie wrote:
It is a good time to be a Structural Engineer.
Or is it?
I am a civil engineer who works with bridges. This thing was designed in the early 60’s for roughly 1/4 of the volume of traffic it now experiences. It had nothing to do with the design.
It was noted by inspectors several years ago that the superstructure was structurally deficient (I forget the number of interstate highway system bridges that have this rating, but I believe it is around 25%). It was noted that connection plates were experiences fatigue cracking, and in a truss, when one connection fails everything does.
MNDOT was on it’s hand and knees begging for money to fix it, they were ignored, and will now probably have the blame pushed onto them. It’s pretty much a daily routine for state bridge engineers.
Before I had my current job in the private sector I interned for 2 years with the state department of transportation, and if people saw the daily correspondance between the structural offices and the field inspectors there would be mass hysteria. You ask for money to fix this, congress gets it, but they have it ear marked for their own pet projects and the people who know what they are doing are left with 5 pounds of shit to shove in a 10 pound sack.
“What? Bridge might kill hundreds? You need $10 million? OK, here’s $10 million, but $3 million goes to build a library with my name on it, $2 million goes to build a spawning pool so purple mountain spotted tadpoles can grow.”
This is the type of incident to wake people up, it’s just unfortunate that so people have to die everytime America needs it.
[/quote]
Unfortunately we are a reactive society, not a proactive one. Maybe if these infrastructure issues were causing the glaciers to thaw people might take notice…
[quote]Donut62 wrote:
Chewie wrote:
It is a good time to be a Structural Engineer.
Or is it?
I am a civil engineer who works with bridges. [/quote]
I started my career as a bridge engineer. That is why these things spark my interest.
It is just like in New Orleans or any public works disaster. Everyone looks at the engineer first.
It is really odd. People really don’t understand the impact engineers have on society until something like this happens.
Then they go back to this:
Person: “What do you do for a living?”
Me: “I am an engineer.”
Person: “So what do engineers do?”
Silver Bridge Disaster
Sunday Gazette-Mail
December 13, 1992
25 Years Later, Bridge Collapse Still Haunts W. Va. Town
Terry Wallace
POINT PLEASANT (AP) - Bill McCormick cannot forget the wrenching sound of twisting steel and the heart-stopping sight across the Ohio River when the Silver Bridge fell down 25 years ago.
McCormick, Odell Hysell and others were working on a cold fuel dock on Dec. 15, 1967, not far from the two-lane suspension bridge connecting Ohio and West Virginia, about 35 miles northwest of Charleston.
The men dashed for their boats, gunned their diesel engines and sped toward the wash of sinking cars, tractor-trailers and collapsed metal. The river was a body-numbing 43 degrees.
“When we went out, we saw two men hanging on to their truck and debris. I tried to pull in one and Odell tried to pull in another,” McCormick said. “It was very cold. In fact, the last fellow we pulled in, a [tow boat] captain for the Ohio River Co., said that if we hadn’t gotten there when we did, he couldn’t have held on.”
The collapse of the U.S. 35 bridge between Point Pleasant and Kanauga, Ohio, killed 46 motorists.
It was also a turning point in the way American engineers think of bridges, according to Lisle Williams of Pittsburgh, a bridge designer and chairman of next year’s International Bridge Conference.
“The Silver Bridge was one of about 550,000 bridges across the country that basically received no attention once they were constructed,” he said. “Once they were put up, people kind of thought they’d be there forever.”
After years of corrosion and neglect, a crucial joint in the 39-year-old bridge’s suspension system snapped and the normal vibrations of heavy rush-hour traffic shook it apart. Dozens of cars and trucks followed the structure into the river.
“You need a catastrophic failure prior to gaining everybody’s attention,” Williams said.
Some fear it could happen again.
“There have been some changes, but I wouldn’t say that it was particularly any better now,” said Henry Jasny, attorney for the Ralph Nader-affiliated Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety in Washington, D.C.
“I’d say that the odds of such a collapse today are equal,” Jasny said.
Since the Silver Bridge disaster, new federal standards require bridge inspections every two years. But, Jasny said, the quality of inspections varies from state to state.
For example, he said, a 100-foot section of the Interstate 95 bridge over the Mianus River in Connecticut collapsed in June 1983, killing three people. Investigators blamed the collapse on corrosion.
A survey of state engineers in the November’s Better Roads magazine showed that 34 percent, or 206,904 bridges of the nation’s approximately 600,750 bridges are substandard.
The survey showed 55 percent of bridges are substandard in West Virginia and Massachusetts, the worst states, with 3,556 bridges and 2,788 bridges substandard, respectively.
Mississippi and Maine, each with 51 percent, and Hawaii, 50 percent, also had more than half of their bridges rated substandard, according to the survey.
But the survey showed the best state is Arizona, with 7 percent, or 417 bridges, substandard.
States with less than 20 percent of substandard bridges are Idaho, 10 percent; Nevada, 11 percent; Wyoming and Utah, each with 12 percent; Connecticut, 15 percent; and California, 19 percent, according to the survey.
Thomas Zimmie, a professor of civil engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., said bridge inspections have improved in the past five years.
“They’ve really gotten their act together,” he said. “You’ve got companies here that do nothing but bridge inspections.”
Zimmie helped investigate the April 1987 collapse of the Schoharie Creek Bridge on the New York State Thruway near Albany. Ten people died when, Zimmie said, a flood undermined the bridge supports, a phenomenon called “scour.”
Zimmie agreed hazards can go unnoticed and unsuspected until disaster strikes.
“There’s always going to be something that pops up,” he said. “Who could have predicted ‘scour’?”
The 1,750-foot Silver Bridge, opened in 1928 and named for the color of its aluminum-based paint, was different from familiar suspension bridges like the Golden Gate in San Francisco and the Brooklyn and Verrazano-Narrows in New York.
Instead of relying upon massive spun cables for support, the Silver Bridge’s roadway hung from carbon-steel chains, which, in turn, were supported by two towers and were anchored on either shore.
Officials said about 6,600 vehicles used the bridge daily. It had no load limit.
According to a National Transportation Safety Board report, a joint in the chain supporting the roadway snapped just outside the bridge’s Ohio-side tower.
Traffic vibrations and the weight of the deck and the 37 vehicles on it, including two gravel trucks and five tractor-trailer rigs, pulled down on the Ohio-side chains and toppled the Ohio tower, according to the report.
The collapse then toppled the West Virginia tower and pulled the rest of the bridge into the river, according to the report.
Only the bridge’s West Virginia approach and four piers remained standing.
The board found that the Silver Bridge had not been thoroughly inspected for 16 years. Since then, it said, the chains were inspected only from the bridge deck by road workers using binoculars.
“Evidence of severe corrosion was found in many portions of the bridge structure,” the report said. “Periodic complete inspections would have furnished much more detailed information to the state concerning the condition of all vital parts of the bridge.”
Paul Wedge, an official with the Boilermakers’ union and former president of the Mason County school board, died with his wife in the disaster.
Son Jimmy Joe Wedge, later Point Pleasant’s mayor, was coaching the Point Pleasant High School basketball team and was expecting his parents at the game.
“The longer the game went on, the harder it got to focus on it, I guarantee you that,” he said.
John A. Wilson, then Mason County’s Civil Defense director, ordered all roads into Point Pleasant blocked to keep out spectators. Wilson, now 77, recalled his move outraged at least one merchant who complained of the effect on his Christmas sales.
The Ohio River was reopened to barge traffic 36 hours after the collapse, but bodies continued to be recovered as late as the end of January 1968.
Wilson’s voice still trembles when he recalls a man who escaped his car but his wife and child did not. He remembered a brother of a dead man who came to remove gifts from the wreckage of a car to assure the surviving family some sort of Christmas.
“Every time I pass that site, I think about it,” Wilson said.
President Johnson declared an emergency the day of the collapse. Four days later. Sen. Jennings Randolph, D-W.Va., chairman of the Senate Public Works Committee, announced hearings that led to the first federal bridge inspection requirements.
The Ohio River bridge at St. Marys, W.Va., which was of similar design and vintage to the Silver Bridge, was closed immediately, never to reopen.
The Silver Bridge made the intersection of Main and Sixth streets one of the busiest in Point Pleasant. Today, it is so quiet that cars park in the middle of Sixth Street.
Exactly two years after the collapse, a new Ohio River bridge was opened between Mason County, W.Va., and Gallia County, Ohio The 1,800-foot, four-lane Silver Memorial Bridge was built just south of Point Pleasant of a rigid cantilever-truss design.
Point Pleasant had a thriving downtown and was home to 5,800 residents. Today, bypassed, Point Pleasant’s downtown is still trying to recover from the loss of traffic, and the town’s population is down to about 5,000.
“It’s not just the personal impact, but the overall impact on the community, the county and our immediate area. Our economy has never recovered,” Wilson said.
A simple monument stands where the West Virginia approach to the bridge used to be. Set in a concrete semicircle, red bricks are inscribed with the names of the 46 people who died on the bridge.
Disasters
West Virginia Division of Culture
[quote]Chewie wrote:
Donut62 wrote:
Chewie wrote:
It is a good time to be a Structural Engineer.
Or is it?
I am a civil engineer who works with bridges.
I started my career as a bridge engineer. That is why these things spark my interest.
It is just like in New Orleans or any public works disaster. Everyone looks at the engineer first.
It is really odd. People really don’t understand the impact engineers have on society until something like this happens.
Then they go back to this:
Person: “What do you do for a living?”
Me: “I am an engineer.”
Person: “So what do engineers do?”
[/quote]
Me: “Drive trains.”
And then I make choo choo sounds.
[quote]Donut62 wrote:
Chewie wrote:
It is a good time to be a Structural Engineer.
Or is it?
I am a civil engineer who works with bridges. This thing was designed in the early 60’s for roughly 1/4 of the volume of traffic it now experiences. It had nothing to do with the design.
It was noted by inspectors several years ago that the superstructure was structurally deficient (I forget the number of interstate highway system bridges that have this rating, but I believe it is around 25%). It was noted that connection plates were experiences fatigue cracking, and in a truss, when one connection fails everything does.
MNDOT was on it’s hand and knees begging for money to fix it, they were ignored, and will now probably have the blame pushed onto them. It’s pretty much a daily routine for state bridge engineers.
Before I had my current job in the private sector I interned for 2 years with the state department of transportation, and if people saw the daily correspondance between the structural offices and the field inspectors there would be mass hysteria. You ask for money to fix this, congress gets it, but they have it ear marked for their own pet projects and the people who know what they are doing are left with 5 pounds of shit to shove in a 10 pound sack.
“What? Bridge might kill hundreds? You need $10 million? OK, here’s $10 million, but $3 million goes to build a library with my name on it, $2 million goes to build a spawning pool so purple mountain spotted tadpoles can grow.”
This is the type of incident to wake people up, it’s just unfortunate that so people have to die everytime America needs it.
[/quote]
Given the state of the housing market in the late 90’s, early '00’s, most people have no idea how much the Northern suburbs have exploded. There is no question when that bridge was built the engineers could not even begin to accurately estimate the volume of traffic that it would have to contend with 40 years later.
I work for the state, so I understand your frustration. They seem to adopt the philosophy of why spend money on something that doesn’t immediately increase economic productivity or gain political influence.
If spending 10 million dollars only keeps things the same (in this case scores of people remaining alive), then why not spend 10 million dollars on something that can make change like buying antique street lamps for the entire historic district or building an obnoxiously large museum, ignoring the fact that it’s a flood zone which won’t allow for any exhibits on the first floor.
I was four blocks away in a bar. I didnt hear a thing. The lights flickered in the bar. I ran out, and what a site. There was so many people watching. I watched from the Stone Arch Bridge, that ended up being used for emergency vehicle transportation. Just nuts.
[quote]pittbulll wrote:
25 Years Later, Bridge Collapse Still Haunts W. Va. Town
Terry Wallace
POINT PLEASANT (AP) - Bill McCormick cannot forget the wrenching sound of twisting steel and the heart-stopping sight across the Ohio River when the Silver Bridge fell down 25 years ago.
[/quote]
I can’t believe that there is such a long article about the Silver Bridge incident and no talk of the Mothman!
Ok, sorry, this is a serious subject and sorry for making light of it. It’s interesting to hear from the Civil Engineers on this stuff. I had no idea the bridge infrastructure of this country was so delapidated.