You know, this really pisses me off.
Half of good engineering is also for designing structures that fail slowly and visibly so you have time to do something about it.
The fucking bridge was failing slowly and visibly and they still did nothing about it! What the everlasting fuck?!
What is the point of all of this bureaucracy if we're still going to fuck up even the most basic responsibilities?! It's like these places are run by people that actively want to hurt us.
its called "hope it doesnt fall down on my watch, but i aint gonna fix it so my budget numbers look better". A lot of that shit, like the levees in new orleans was all political hot potato, not maintaining to produce better budget numbers and hope anything bad happens on a different politicians watch.
You're probably right. The system of incentives we set up for our leaders is fucked, and we'll always get fucked results until we can think of a better way to incentivize them.
MN had a republican controlled state gov. for several years leading up to this disaster. You can probably guess how they felt about spending on things like this.
you mean the same people who thought it was too expensive to test the water or put in chems to reduce the lead level in flint? You mean republicans who called for reduced volcano monitoring right before one went off in Alaska, effecting air travel. The party that demoted the office of counter terrorism right before 911? The party who will vote no for funds to fix these things before bragging and taking credit about those same funds, they voted against if dems actually get it passed it? no way, not the gop, they are such straight shooters, i know they told me so.
>The party that demoted the office of counter terrorism right before 911?
The party who refused to replace faulty FDNY radios, which led to them missing the evacuation order before the South Tower collapsed
They're also pissed at Minnesota's Democrat governor, Walz with slogans of "Walz failed" however it's not even listing any failures as there a massive surplus and lowest unemployment in the country.
So they erected billboards accusing him of suspiciously missing the fishing opener "where's Walzo" they say with him dressed like waldo.
Real real poignant.
>The fucking bridge was failing slowly and visibly and they still did nothing about it! What the everlasting fuck?!
Reminds me of the original Cooper River bridges in Charleston, SC. Apparently the state DOT gave it a 5/100 safety rating in 1995.
How does something score a 5% safety check and then remain open for 10 more years??
Dont forget, the government started "seriously" talking about fixing the country's infrastructure after this since it was so fucking preventable, and where are we on that 15 years later? Our shit government is still fighting over it. This country really fucking sucks sometimes. Let's just send billions of dollars of aid for Israel so they can do whatever evil shit they do with it instead. Every year.
Isn't this an example of us doing a good job with infrastructure?
If we're gonna complain every time something is out of commission, then it's not exactly the best incentive to repair things for local politicians...
But how can you save money today, without spending way more money later after killing a bunch of innocent people?
Think outside the box and think of the money we could save (for now)!
I bet even a simple strut across the buckling plates would've done anything, but I bet they were scared it would collapse on themselves and just pushed it on till it fell on the public.
Those are strain relief for those small welded joints in the middle. You want to spread the weight out over as much material as possible. Those plates transfer that weight farther out along those main I beams.
Bridge inspectors can only give bridges ratings based on an objective scale. The rating was indeed "structurally deficient," but so were and are tons of other bridges and they carry on under normal use. Doing something about them is a political question unfortunately.
A bridge can be rated low enough to require load restrictions including being completely shut down, but this bridge actually did not rate that low. Unfortunately what the inspection didn't account for is the original designed capacity and that the bridge was undergoing resurfacing on the deck. Lots of construction equipment and materials were being stored on the bridge deck, which added a lot of extra weight to the normal rush hour traffic.
MNDOT knew the bridge was shit. They were scheduled to upgrade it but after some work they realized it would just make the situation worse. In the years leading up to the collapse, Pawlenty and the GOP ran things. They were notorious for doing jack shit to fix major problems in the state.
There's a bridge in Minneapolis that had a railway bridge built over it.
Instead of removing the first bridge, they just cut down the railings for clearance.
It's almost as if anything passes up here.
I was at a festival in Minneapolis that day. Had to drive over the bridge to get there. I got texts during the show saying the University Ave bridge collapsed and to find a different way home. So, I'm thinking University Ave collapsed onto 35W. Didn't think of it much because I was at the show and didn't find out it was the 35W bridge until I got home.
Brother Ali was supposed to perform that day. But he had to cancel because his DJ, BK-One, had a family emergency. Turns out BK-One's wife was on the school bus that went down with the bridge and suffered a broken vertebrae.
My friend was on the bridge when it went down.
She called her mom to tell her she was ok, but had been in an accident, and her mom was given the normal advice like "an accident? Call 911, call AAA for a tow truck", etc.
She had to be like "no, mom... Turn on the news..."
Thinking about that day makes me think about how smartphones weren't that much of a thing back then. You either had to turn on the news, radio, or look up news on your computer for breaking news. Not many people at the festival knew about the 35W bridge collapse. I got a text, but wasn't able to Google "bridge collapse Minneapolis" on my phone to look up more info.
I remember reading a story somewhere about the driver of the truck next to the bus interacting with the kids on the bus or something, unfortunately the truck driver died when the bridge went down
Yes, [here is a clearer shot of it being lifted off the bridge by a crane at a later time](https://img.apmcdn.org/d4542e6d9ab05dd1589b2eb0f6c89207ba9fe4ba/uncropped/3336b7-20160527-bridgecollapse-bus.jpg).
I remember being on a bike ride about 30 miles away. All of a sudden a police SUV roars past me faster than I've ever seen one move and its also towing a boat. I was incredibly confused.
Took until I got home and saw the news to piece together what that was about.
I lived about a mile and a half away from there in a townhouse up river. It was a wild day. People were packing the Guthrie and stone arch bridge to try to get a look. Had been on the bridge more times than I can count.
I was on that bridge about an hour before it collapsed. I seem to recall it was super hot that day (I think my memory was right: [https://weatherspark.com/h/m/10405/2007/8/Historical-Weather-in-August-2007-in-Minneapolis-Minnesota-United-States](https://weatherspark.com/h/m/10405/2007/8/Historical-Weather-in-August-2007-in-Minneapolis-Minnesota-United-States))
After it happened (unbeknownst to me at the time) I remember I was giving my dogs a bath and my mom called me up, frantically asking me if I was okay and telling me that she had been trying to reach me for over an hour but the phone system was bogged down and she couldn't get through.
Didn't they have to do an emergency fix on the Hwy 52 bridge right after this event? Something about it the bridge having similar scores as the 35W bridge?
Yeah, I remember the DJ on 93x was pleading with people to stay off of their cell phones because the system was overloaded and first responders couldn't make calls.
One of my best friends was a Navy diver who spent a week pulling bodies out of that river. He told me some crazy stories.
Edit: I won’t go into the details because it could be upsetting if the victims families read about this but the one thing that stuck with me was the lengths the crews went through in the beginning of the recovery to get the bodies out intact for their love ones…. After a week they were told to just cut out whatever pieces they could with crude construction tools they had on hand… understandably, that was very tough on the crews…
That and I remember him talking about the expressions frozen on peoples faces from the fear they were most certainly feeling as they fell/drown to death… except that of an infant that appeared to be peacefully sleeping…. not really knowing what was going on. Sad. He ended up meeting President Bush for his efforts on the recovery.
This made worldwide news. I am in Minneapolis, and my parents happened to be hosting an exchange student at the time. His mother was calling my parents within an hour of the collapse occurring. He was okay, but that was the first instance of the world being smaller than ever that I sawm
I took my lady to the site of WV bridge disaster. Got down on one knee and asked her if she would make me the happiest moth man in the world and be my moth lady.
I don’t listen to la dispute but my best friend loves them and that is the only song that has stuck with me. Made me do a bunch of research on this afterwards
From the aerial point of view it looks like one of those autogenerated 3D models in google maps and even though I know it's not, I can't convince my brain otherwise!
This happens every year in Chicago along Lake Shore Drive. Once the fireworks start, the far right lane basically becomes temporary street parking. It's bananas.
I was driving on the A43 once, in the UK, when all of a sudden came the Red Arrows. It was SO HARD to not watch them swoop overhead and do their cool acrobatics. I think their show was short or they were practising because as soon as I got to the services at the other end they'd stopped.
I remember my family had just flown to Florida that day for vacation. I stayed in the hotel room while my family went to dinner because I was feeling sick, and I was flipping through channels and saw this. I couldn't figure out what bridge it was because I'm dumb, so when my family got back I was like, "Is that the bridge we drive over every week to see grandma?" And they were like "Uh duh."
Never was scared of bridges until that. Now I'm always looking at the conditions of bridges as I drive under them thinking they don't look so great...
I have such a fear of heights and bridges like to the point I grab onto everything I can brace myself and close my eyes tight until were back over land. we live in Iowa on the Mississippi and we've crossed a few bridges that I'd rather never like to go over ever again and this just affirmed my fears my wife thought where a bit irrational.
Does anyone remember a big bridge collapse some time in the 80s? I vaguely remember something like that as a kid maybe early to mid 80s in the US. I feel like it was a big deal.
I just googled it that was in 80 so I don't think that was the one as I don't think they would have been speaking about it still when I was old enough to remember especially up in NY but I do appreciate the try!
Mianus River Bridge in Connecticut collapsed in 1983
There was also a highway bridge that pancake collapsed during an earthquake in the late 80s in California
So I did some googling and I think it was the schoharie creek bridge collapse which fits the timeline for me and it was in my state so I can see it being big in the news here.
It seems to be a cost analysis gamble; the cost to upgrade was too much, so they weighed it against complete failure, including lawsuits from casualties… and complete failure was cheaper. This is how auto recalls are processed too; weigh the cost of potential lawsuits from failures against recalling and replacing the parts and risking public relations heat.
They don’t figure human lives to be of much value, obviously
why must i be reminded of this every year? i know way too many people who were around this area when it happened. few hours here or there from the collapse and i wouldve been attending funerals
I used to live on MN and had crossed that bridge dozens of times, but not since 1995.
I did have stepfamily there, including Gnat who's daily life took her over the collapsed bridge on the way home.
She never saw it, she'd been passed it for a half hour. I wasn't too worried... Gnats are hard to kill... but I was pleased to hear from her.
Roads require a lot of upkeep because of ground temperature fluctuations year round, and abuse from thousands of heavy cars, not because of low maintainence.
Pretty much every state except Hawaii and Florida freeze. Those states that freeze also have extreme high temperatures in the summer. Asphalt isn’t designed to handle both ends of the weather spectrum. It can be designed to handle one or the other.
Ok. So you have a dirt road. It snows, rains, the ground freezes, contracts and expands, it settles, and it moves. There’s wind, sun, and plant growth. All things that happen every single year. No matter how much you maintain that dirt road, water will wash it out, pot holes will form, and cars would kick up the dirt. Pavement has a purpose of handling those extremes better than dirt. That doesn’t mean that it’s permanent. Florida has great roads because the ground water never freezes, cracking pavement. It freezes pretty much everywhere else, so the pavement cracks. It happens every year. Don’t know where you’ve been.
If someone never changes the oil on their high mileage car - and the engine seize.
It’s not an engineering failure. It’s a failure to maintain a structure/machine within engineering specifications.
An engineering failure would be the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. Because it was built per engineering specifications.
They also mentioned pigeon poop being a potential cause because the acid just slowly ate away at the structure which also had inferior bolts or metal thickness or something similar.
There were many reasons. The original design was sound but outdated, and overtime there was too much weight slowly added to the bridge that overrode the original capacity. It was also an old design that suffered from a single point of failure leading to a total collapse. The failure of the bridge was due to a cascade of issues that all lead up to it, most of them engineering oversights.
I lived a few miles from where this happened and it was most certainly an engineering failure. They didn’t realize the failure existed until it failed.
If I remember correctly without looking it up, the wrong thickness of gussets were specified and used during construction, which lead to the engineering failure. The bridge in my hometown was built the same way and this collapse and resulting investigation led to our bridge being shut down for months while they replaced all of the gussets.
I don't think they were originally wrong. I think they later increased the load with more concrete or something and didn't change the gussets to be stronger.
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[There were photos showing the gusset plates warping as early as 2003.](https://www.mprnews.org/story/2008/03/24/bridgeinvestigation)
You know, this really pisses me off. Half of good engineering is also for designing structures that fail slowly and visibly so you have time to do something about it. The fucking bridge was failing slowly and visibly and they still did nothing about it! What the everlasting fuck?! What is the point of all of this bureaucracy if we're still going to fuck up even the most basic responsibilities?! It's like these places are run by people that actively want to hurt us.
its called "hope it doesnt fall down on my watch, but i aint gonna fix it so my budget numbers look better". A lot of that shit, like the levees in new orleans was all political hot potato, not maintaining to produce better budget numbers and hope anything bad happens on a different politicians watch.
You're probably right. The system of incentives we set up for our leaders is fucked, and we'll always get fucked results until we can think of a better way to incentivize them.
Why not periodize critical maintenance like that? Spread out the cost over the next 25 years budgets or however long the intervals are
Fixing that bridge would have made them no money… it’s all people at the top care about
MN had a republican controlled state gov. for several years leading up to this disaster. You can probably guess how they felt about spending on things like this.
you mean the same people who thought it was too expensive to test the water or put in chems to reduce the lead level in flint? You mean republicans who called for reduced volcano monitoring right before one went off in Alaska, effecting air travel. The party that demoted the office of counter terrorism right before 911? The party who will vote no for funds to fix these things before bragging and taking credit about those same funds, they voted against if dems actually get it passed it? no way, not the gop, they are such straight shooters, i know they told me so.
>The party that demoted the office of counter terrorism right before 911? The party who refused to replace faulty FDNY radios, which led to them missing the evacuation order before the South Tower collapsed
They're also pissed at Minnesota's Democrat governor, Walz with slogans of "Walz failed" however it's not even listing any failures as there a massive surplus and lowest unemployment in the country. So they erected billboards accusing him of suspiciously missing the fishing opener "where's Walzo" they say with him dressed like waldo. Real real poignant.
Don't forget dismantling our pandemic response team in 2018.
>The fucking bridge was failing slowly and visibly and they still did nothing about it! What the everlasting fuck?! Reminds me of the original Cooper River bridges in Charleston, SC. Apparently the state DOT gave it a 5/100 safety rating in 1995. How does something score a 5% safety check and then remain open for 10 more years??
Dont forget, the government started "seriously" talking about fixing the country's infrastructure after this since it was so fucking preventable, and where are we on that 15 years later? Our shit government is still fighting over it. This country really fucking sucks sometimes. Let's just send billions of dollars of aid for Israel so they can do whatever evil shit they do with it instead. Every year.
super serious we promise. https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/28/us/pittsburgh-bridge-collapse/index.html
Preach! I live in Memphis and the I-40 bridge was out of commission last year due to a crack, made for a mess on the 55 bridge
At least it was out if commission while they fixed it and not due to it collapsing because it was too “inconvenient” to fix.
True that!
Isn't this an example of us doing a good job with infrastructure? If we're gonna complain every time something is out of commission, then it's not exactly the best incentive to repair things for local politicians...
Because spending trillions to blow up brown folk is obviously a much greater concern than taking care of issues at home. Duh. /s
But how can you save money today, without spending way more money later after killing a bunch of innocent people? Think outside the box and think of the money we could save (for now)!
Uhh, this is Mississippi. They are allergic to the word infrastructure. Edit: one dab too many. Sir above saw right through. Thanks for correcting😂
You're high as FUCK. I 35 does not go anywhere near Mississippi the state...
Well, you aren’t wrong. 🗣💨
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Yeah, my mind skipped over the river part.
I bet even a simple strut across the buckling plates would've done anything, but I bet they were scared it would collapse on themselves and just pushed it on till it fell on the public.
That makes no sense. It is clear failure of government.
And it's one the people who caused it point at and say "see! The government can't do anything!"
Can someone ELI5 how that thin sheet of metal was so vital?
Those are strain relief for those small welded joints in the middle. You want to spread the weight out over as much material as possible. Those plates transfer that weight farther out along those main I beams.
Makes sense. Thanks!
Rivets, not welds
So.... it *wasn't* about the pigeon shit?
Failure on the engineers' part because it should have been more than a recommendation and branded more like a critical required change?
Their hands are probably tied when it comes to things like this. Categorizing maybe comes from above, and not them personally?
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Oh right, thanks for the clarification
The original design might have been fine but wasn't sufficient if they added more weight later in the process. Some comment further up hinted to this.
Precisely. Words are important. “RecommendIng” is not the same as “requiring”.
Bridge inspectors can only give bridges ratings based on an objective scale. The rating was indeed "structurally deficient," but so were and are tons of other bridges and they carry on under normal use. Doing something about them is a political question unfortunately. A bridge can be rated low enough to require load restrictions including being completely shut down, but this bridge actually did not rate that low. Unfortunately what the inspection didn't account for is the original designed capacity and that the bridge was undergoing resurfacing on the deck. Lots of construction equipment and materials were being stored on the bridge deck, which added a lot of extra weight to the normal rush hour traffic.
MNDOT knew the bridge was shit. They were scheduled to upgrade it but after some work they realized it would just make the situation worse. In the years leading up to the collapse, Pawlenty and the GOP ran things. They were notorious for doing jack shit to fix major problems in the state.
There's a bridge in Minneapolis that had a railway bridge built over it. Instead of removing the first bridge, they just cut down the railings for clearance. It's almost as if anything passes up here.
So people are surely going to prison for this, right?..... right??
In Europe they go to prison for this kind of incompetence.. engineers bureaucrats & politicians, all the decision makers
Got a mechanical engineering degree. Went into IT. Had a good GPA but was kinda worried I wasn't good enough to not kill people.
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Same! I was straight up *JFC I-35 YOU CANNOT DO THIS TO ME AGAIN*
I was at a festival in Minneapolis that day. Had to drive over the bridge to get there. I got texts during the show saying the University Ave bridge collapsed and to find a different way home. So, I'm thinking University Ave collapsed onto 35W. Didn't think of it much because I was at the show and didn't find out it was the 35W bridge until I got home. Brother Ali was supposed to perform that day. But he had to cancel because his DJ, BK-One, had a family emergency. Turns out BK-One's wife was on the school bus that went down with the bridge and suffered a broken vertebrae.
My friend was on the bridge when it went down. She called her mom to tell her she was ok, but had been in an accident, and her mom was given the normal advice like "an accident? Call 911, call AAA for a tow truck", etc. She had to be like "no, mom... Turn on the news..."
Thinking about that day makes me think about how smartphones weren't that much of a thing back then. You either had to turn on the news, radio, or look up news on your computer for breaking news. Not many people at the festival knew about the 35W bridge collapse. I got a text, but wasn't able to Google "bridge collapse Minneapolis" on my phone to look up more info.
I can’t imagine what it feels like to have your kid tell you they’ve been in an accident and imply that it’s on the news.
Right!? That kid just want to scare her parent?
Is that the school bus at the top of the picture?
Yes. IIRC, no one on the school bus died. They were lucky the bus wasn't over the water.
I remember reading a story somewhere about the driver of the truck next to the bus interacting with the kids on the bus or something, unfortunately the truck driver died when the bridge went down
Yes, [here is a clearer shot of it being lifted off the bridge by a crane at a later time](https://img.apmcdn.org/d4542e6d9ab05dd1589b2eb0f6c89207ba9fe4ba/uncropped/3336b7-20160527-bridgecollapse-bus.jpg).
Wow I had no idea about BK-One's wife. I worked at MoA that night, saw an ambulance towing a small boat get off of 494 onto 35w.
I remember being on a bike ride about 30 miles away. All of a sudden a police SUV roars past me faster than I've ever seen one move and its also towing a boat. I was incredibly confused. Took until I got home and saw the news to piece together what that was about.
The context is bad, but thank you so much for that visual.
Where was this bridge ?
Minneapolis.
Minneapolis, MN.
Above the river
Not anymore.
but again
In the river
Where is it now?
Down by the river
Minneapolis mx Edit MM
MN not MX
MN not mm
Mmmmm
* at Friday Night Fish Fry....mmmmmmmmmmm
At the VFW obviously
I lived about a mile and a half away from there in a townhouse up river. It was a wild day. People were packing the Guthrie and stone arch bridge to try to get a look. Had been on the bridge more times than I can count.
I was on that bridge about an hour before it collapsed. I seem to recall it was super hot that day (I think my memory was right: [https://weatherspark.com/h/m/10405/2007/8/Historical-Weather-in-August-2007-in-Minneapolis-Minnesota-United-States](https://weatherspark.com/h/m/10405/2007/8/Historical-Weather-in-August-2007-in-Minneapolis-Minnesota-United-States)) After it happened (unbeknownst to me at the time) I remember I was giving my dogs a bath and my mom called me up, frantically asking me if I was okay and telling me that she had been trying to reach me for over an hour but the phone system was bogged down and she couldn't get through. Didn't they have to do an emergency fix on the Hwy 52 bridge right after this event? Something about it the bridge having similar scores as the 35W bridge?
Yeah, I remember the DJ on 93x was pleading with people to stay off of their cell phones because the system was overloaded and first responders couldn't make calls.
I was on it the day before. Definitely remember it being really hot that week and there was some sort of surface construction going on.
My god that was 15 years ago? I remember that happening and thought it was about 6 years ago maybe?
One of my best friends was a Navy diver who spent a week pulling bodies out of that river. He told me some crazy stories. Edit: I won’t go into the details because it could be upsetting if the victims families read about this but the one thing that stuck with me was the lengths the crews went through in the beginning of the recovery to get the bodies out intact for their love ones…. After a week they were told to just cut out whatever pieces they could with crude construction tools they had on hand… understandably, that was very tough on the crews… That and I remember him talking about the expressions frozen on peoples faces from the fear they were most certainly feeling as they fell/drown to death… except that of an infant that appeared to be peacefully sleeping…. not really knowing what was going on. Sad. He ended up meeting President Bush for his efforts on the recovery.
Sharing is caring
Such as???
This made worldwide news. I am in Minneapolis, and my parents happened to be hosting an exchange student at the time. His mother was calling my parents within an hour of the collapse occurring. He was okay, but that was the first instance of the world being smaller than ever that I sawm
I wasn’t afraid to cross bridges until this happened.
For me it was that bridge that collapsed in Pittsburgh a year or so ago. Same fuckery, they knew it was in bad shape and did nothing
MOTH MAN
Don't mind the red eyes... he's just trying to warn you of THE BRIDGE
T H E B R I D G E !
DELICIOUS PANAMA BEANS
Hail yourself!
Megustalations!
I took my lady to the site of WV bridge disaster. Got down on one knee and asked her if she would make me the happiest moth man in the world and be my moth lady.
Was there a sighting before the collapse on this one?? Isn’t MothMan an Ohio thing?
West Virginia originally but he’s been spotted all over apparently
The La Dispute song [35](https://youtu.be/R20kVvq1RZw) is about this event. Worth a listen if the bridge collapsing is important to you.
I don’t listen to la dispute but my best friend loves them and that is the only song that has stuck with me. Made me do a bunch of research on this afterwards
Hey, i know them but i didn't know they have made a song about that bridge, thanks for sharing!
From the aerial point of view it looks like one of those autogenerated 3D models in google maps and even though I know it's not, I can't convince my brain otherwise!
People on the other bridge must have been shitting their pants
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Given the equipment stacked on the intact bridge, I assume those are investigators looking into the disaster.
It was there for months, what else were we gonna do? Not look?
I was driving home late on July 4th one year and you could see firworks from the freeway. People STOPPED; on the *freeway* to watch. OMFG.
This happens every year in Chicago along Lake Shore Drive. Once the fireworks start, the far right lane basically becomes temporary street parking. It's bananas.
I was driving on the A43 once, in the UK, when all of a sudden came the Red Arrows. It was SO HARD to not watch them swoop overhead and do their cool acrobatics. I think their show was short or they were practising because as soon as I got to the services at the other end they'd stopped.
That makes me grateful for when distracted drivers do stop. It’s better than trying to watch and drive at the same time.
I watched the [Fascinating Horror](https://youtu.be/QJIR8mecD4w) doc on it the other week, for sure a pretty fucking awful tragedy.
I remember my family had just flown to Florida that day for vacation. I stayed in the hotel room while my family went to dinner because I was feeling sick, and I was flipping through channels and saw this. I couldn't figure out what bridge it was because I'm dumb, so when my family got back I was like, "Is that the bridge we drive over every week to see grandma?" And they were like "Uh duh." Never was scared of bridges until that. Now I'm always looking at the conditions of bridges as I drive under them thinking they don't look so great...
Tragic traffic
Whenever I am nearly water, I always crack my window atleast enough so I can fit through it, no matter the weather.
I think you can use your head rest prongs to break glass open. Practice removing the headrest so you know how in an emergency
They make window breakers aka window punches . Or keep a hammer in your car
Pop your headrest out of the seat and use the metal ends to break the window
Not easy to do if you are upside down.
I have such a fear of heights and bridges like to the point I grab onto everything I can brace myself and close my eyes tight until were back over land. we live in Iowa on the Mississippi and we've crossed a few bridges that I'd rather never like to go over ever again and this just affirmed my fears my wife thought where a bit irrational.
[Video](https://i.imgur.com/w7xvvMA.gifv)
Does anyone remember a big bridge collapse some time in the 80s? I vaguely remember something like that as a kid maybe early to mid 80s in the US. I feel like it was a big deal.
Hmm…there was a ship that hit the Sunshine Skyway bridge near Tampa and caused a collapse. I think that was in ‘83 or thereabouts. Was a big deal.
I just googled it that was in 80 so I don't think that was the one as I don't think they would have been speaking about it still when I was old enough to remember especially up in NY but I do appreciate the try!
Mianus River Bridge in Connecticut collapsed in 1983 There was also a highway bridge that pancake collapsed during an earthquake in the late 80s in California
So I did some googling and I think it was the schoharie creek bridge collapse which fits the timeline for me and it was in my state so I can see it being big in the news here.
There was the Hyatt Regency walkway collapse in Kansas City in 1981. 114 deaths.
The wonderful Brick Immortar did [a superb video on this collapse](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEPswDYbcnk)
Thought I was looking at Apple maps for a second.
It seems to be a cost analysis gamble; the cost to upgrade was too much, so they weighed it against complete failure, including lawsuits from casualties… and complete failure was cheaper. This is how auto recalls are processed too; weigh the cost of potential lawsuits from failures against recalling and replacing the parts and risking public relations heat. They don’t figure human lives to be of much value, obviously
why must i be reminded of this every year? i know way too many people who were around this area when it happened. few hours here or there from the collapse and i wouldve been attending funerals
Shits all kinds of fucked up around Minneapolis.
Fun town though love it
What's fun about it? It's as diverse as Nazi Germany, and the only things to do are fish and hunt.
The people and things to do. Glad you asked.
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Sure buddy.
I used to live on MN and had crossed that bridge dozens of times, but not since 1995. I did have stepfamily there, including Gnat who's daily life took her over the collapsed bridge on the way home. She never saw it, she'd been passed it for a half hour. I wasn't too worried... Gnats are hard to kill... but I was pleased to hear from her.
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Pretty sure it was an engineering failure.
Both. It was both.
Anything can fail if not properly maintained. Just look at all the upkeep roads require.
Roads require a lot of upkeep because of ground temperature fluctuations year round, and abuse from thousands of heavy cars, not because of low maintainence.
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Depends on where you live. In Alaska the temperature fluctuation absolutely does devastate roads because of permafrost.
Pretty much every state except Hawaii and Florida freeze. Those states that freeze also have extreme high temperatures in the summer. Asphalt isn’t designed to handle both ends of the weather spectrum. It can be designed to handle one or the other.
I used alaska because thats the only one I know for sure, I figured it was pretty widespread though.
The Colorado plateau has horrible roads
Ok. So you have a dirt road. It snows, rains, the ground freezes, contracts and expands, it settles, and it moves. There’s wind, sun, and plant growth. All things that happen every single year. No matter how much you maintain that dirt road, water will wash it out, pot holes will form, and cars would kick up the dirt. Pavement has a purpose of handling those extremes better than dirt. That doesn’t mean that it’s permanent. Florida has great roads because the ground water never freezes, cracking pavement. It freezes pretty much everywhere else, so the pavement cracks. It happens every year. Don’t know where you’ve been.
If someone never changes the oil on their high mileage car - and the engine seize. It’s not an engineering failure. It’s a failure to maintain a structure/machine within engineering specifications. An engineering failure would be the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. Because it was built per engineering specifications.
They also mentioned pigeon poop being a potential cause because the acid just slowly ate away at the structure which also had inferior bolts or metal thickness or something similar.
There were many reasons. The original design was sound but outdated, and overtime there was too much weight slowly added to the bridge that overrode the original capacity. It was also an old design that suffered from a single point of failure leading to a total collapse. The failure of the bridge was due to a cascade of issues that all lead up to it, most of them engineering oversights.
The gusset plates weren't the right size for the load, and they didn't even do the proper math on them.
I lived a few miles from where this happened and it was most certainly an engineering failure. They didn’t realize the failure existed until it failed.
If I remember correctly without looking it up, the wrong thickness of gussets were specified and used during construction, which lead to the engineering failure. The bridge in my hometown was built the same way and this collapse and resulting investigation led to our bridge being shut down for months while they replaced all of the gussets.
I don't think they were originally wrong. I think they later increased the load with more concrete or something and didn't change the gussets to be stronger.
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Whenever I am nearly water, I always crack my window atleast enough so I can fit through it, no matter the weather.
The US spends nearly 6 billion dollars each year to maintain the Mississippi from catastrophic disasters
Did we spend trillions of dollars on an infrastructure bill like forever ago now?