Comments
Please wait...
Comments are closed.
Commenting on this item is available only to members of the site. You can sign in here or create an account here.
Editors' Picks
is a proud member of the
media network
media network
All contents © Index Newspapers LLC
800 Maynard Ave S, Suite 200, Seattle, WA 98134
800 Maynard Ave S, Suite 200, Seattle, WA 98134
Infrastructure fails why we spend our money on foreign wars, social entitlements and bank bailouts.
Appraisal: Functionally obsolete
And they did what about it....
I hope none of those people are hurt bad. I fear for the worst.
Ball is in your court Republicans.
70,925 average daily traffic is 3x what LINK gets.
http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/NR/rdonlyres/6A5…
It is "Somewhat better than minimum adequacy to tolerate being left in place as is".
http://www.nationalbridges.com/index.php…
Even if you you think that if the political philosophy you are in love with ruled all and therefore all sorts of money were available to fix our collapsing bridges, this bridge wasn't even on the list. You'd have fixed a hell of a lot of other bridges with money you got from taxes you want raised or pork waste you want cut before you'd have ever fixed this bridge. You probably wouldn't have gotten around to fixing this one for many years.
So. Why did this one fall down?
Fucking Hell, I'm driving to Vancouver BC tomorrow. This should be interesting.
How long before kooks blame terrorists?
See? Easy!
When someone just doesn't get the analogy and blasts me with some kind of misdirected rage, the hard part is having to think...do I try and argue? Do I hope they go away and stew in their own lack of comprehension in some other venue? More typically, someone else steps in and explains it to them in small words. I thank the world, that there are those people...or I would have passed out from exhaustion a long time ago.
This is going to be a hell of a holiday weekend for anyone driving north.
There are several such bridges on routes I travel fairly often. I tell you, infrastructure repair is a major reason I refuse to vote republican.
You're an idiot troll.
Please explain how we are supposed to pay for rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure let alone for things like high speed rail?
If we are going to compete with China and the EU we are going to need to make our infrastructure top notch. That requires raising taxes, especially on the rich and on corporations.
Only an idiot would want us to build even more roads while ignoring transit and high speed rail.
End of story.
"Structural Evaluation: Somewhat better than minimum adequacy to tolerate being left in place as is."
But removing highways is what you all support. Let's see how this works out, everyone can take the bus now right.
Read the reports moron:
"Structural Evaluation: Somewhat better than minimum adequacy to tolerate being left in place as is."
When did America lose its fucking pride? We use to strive to have the best. Now we argue we can't even afford to fix rusting bridges.
there's not a grid to disperse into, funny guy.
End the war on cars!
I wonder how long it takes to replace a bridge like that?
According to the transit-nazis, you can simply remove highways like the Viaduct and replace them with potted plants and there'll be no problems.
Come on guys, don't leave us hanging. Tell us all about how gay sex and/or Blackness caused this tragedy.
We were the country that put men on the moon!
Now we don't even have a functioning space program.
WTF!
Well, unless the driver's name was 'Tim Eyman', you all can shut the fuck up now.
Probably a Teamster driver.
Wow, you have x-ray eyes?
It's as logical an explanation for a collapse as any, but it'll obviously be awhile before WSP and WSDOT figure out what happened. I just hope nobody got killed.
'
58,
I support infrastructure renewal as well. Whatever happened to that high-speed rail corridor the chattering classes couldn't shut up about back in 2008? Weren't we supposed to get one running between Blaine and Portland?
It's certainly probably that a heavy truck making contact with the bridge precipitated its collapse. However, would a newer bridge have collapsed under the same circumstances? Would a bridge with proper shoulders even have been in danger?
We may find it was a criminally heavy load and the driver collided with the bridge in just the right way to bring it down. Maybe any bridge would have collapsed under these circumstances. But, I find it hard to believe the age and condition of the bridge didn't play a part.
Given up with your x-ray vision that sees rust inside pillings, now you're an engineer?
only speculating, but i think the design of the bridge was at least partially at fault.
for one, the witness who reporter the strike said that had the oversized vehicle been in the fast lane, it wouldn't have struck the bridge.
this is because the height varies from lane to lane based on the arch over the roadway.
a more uniform clearance might have allowed to more accurate planning bringing through oversized loads.
What does that have to do with an idiot truck driver hitting a bridge?
Oh that's right, nothing, but it just feeeeels right. Surprised you didn't blame Cheney-Haliburton-Monsanto.
incredible news.
But was Tim Eyman driving the truck, because the mouth foamers think he was.
maybe this crossing required something other than a small bridge.
i'm not saying that the bridge design was at fault *legally*. the actual clearance even at the lowest point should have been anticipated after the advance car hit it with enough distance to stop.
but a bridge taking that much traffic over it each day should be built so that even the worst negligence won't destroy it, because that kind of negligence is inevitable given enough time and the consequences far too dangerous to not design around it.
If you want to learn more, read about the collapse of the Silver Bridge in 1967.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Brid…
conceivably after seeing the pilot car hit the railing, it began the process of changing lanes over to the area were the arch is higher.
according to the eyewitness, so long as they were in that lane and not the other, there would be enough clearance for their load.
so they could have switched lanes in response or in in advance of hitting the truss and continued safely along the length of the bridge.
https://twitter.com/SeaTimesPhoto/status…
Douchebags
King County Metro spends about $700 million every year subsidizing bus trips.
In King County alone, about $1.5 BILLION PER YEAR is spent on transit. If one billion per year of that were spent on roads instead of transit, over the past five years ($5 billion total), we could have rebuilt I-5 in King county and had enough money to finish the west end of the new 520 floating bridge, and then had an income stream of $1 billion per year for more road projects.
You never design around the worst case scenario. It's far too expensive, particularly for unusual impact damage. You design to expected load, and probable scenarios. If you've got an oddball load, the onus is on the driver to ensure that it meets the size and weight restrictions along the route. This driver failed to do that. No matter how big a load you design a structure to handle, eventually some idiot will come along and try to squeeze a load by that's excessively large. Even at its lowest point, the Skagit River Bridge was tall enough that it didn't require height warnings to be posted. So that meant that the load was taller than 13.5'. He was severely restricted in routes that he could take, and the fact that he even attempted to cross that bridge meant that he was negligent.
Could they have stripped out the arched truss bridge and replaced it with a sexy cantilever cable-stayed bridge with no height limit? Sure. but it would have cost north of half a billion dollars, and you could build an arched truss bridge for around 1/10 of that.
Btw, are you an engineer or have you ever worked as an engineer (and just for your info, I have)? If not, then stfu (and no, a software engineer is not a real engineer). A lay person giving their opinion on the design of bridges is like a lay person giving their opinion on how to properly perform heart surgery. Without knowledge, your opinion is useless.
I was about to take a trip up north late this afternoon to Sarvey Wildlife but instead went to PAWS in Lynnwood. Was going to take a found Dove (someone's escaped pet) to get looked at.
Tomorrow will ask around the neighbourhood and see if anyone had lost a bird.
Seattle apartment.
Seattle apartment.
@75, there are thousands of almost identical "Warren truss" bridges in the US -- Bridgehunter.com lists 3,961 of them, and almost 24,000 truss bridges of all types. It's a perfectly good type of bridge.
As for "maybe this crossing required something other than a small bridge", yes, that's what "functionally obsolete" means. It was built in 1955, when the population of Whatcom, Skagit, and Snohomish was a fraction of what it is now. In fact, the existence of this bridge is what allowed that population to grow; there's no sprawl if there's no way to get there. If they were building it from scratch today (as they shortly will be), they'd build it bigger, to more easily handle the greater number of vehicles. But you can't just swap out every bridge that gets outgrown, not with all the money in the world. If you were making a list of bridges to replace, this one would have been far down the list, well after all the many, many "about to fall down of its own accord" ones.
Ironically, the new, bigger bridge is sure to suck more traffic onto itself and increase sprawl up there even further, leading to fewer and fewer farms and fewer and fewer wetlands. Say hello to ten thousand shitty new houses with floody basements that Supreme Ruler of the Universe still won't be able to afford.
I look forward to bring priced out of new markets worldwide.
http://seattletimes.com/ABPub/zoom/html/…
It's interesting that the transported load, an open steel box, doesn't show major deformation. From the ST story:
And the Seattle fuckwits would rather spend money on bike lanes and light rail and street cars and new basketball stadiums rather than fix bridges and repair roads.
Yet nobody died.And nobody died when this bridge collapsed either.
There has to be a reason why this is so. How could an earthquake of similar (albeit slightly lower) magnitude to one that killed 316,00 people kill no-one? How could a bridge collapse like this which might have terminated so many lives leave all affected alive?
The answer I would propose to you is that our infrastructure was capable of withstanding the impact in both cases. Because we invested the proper amount of funds into bridges and roads and buildings in WA state, nobody has died in either case.
If we fail to maintain our infrastructure-if we, in hopes of savinga it here, cutting a bit there, stop adequately funding Public Works projects in our area-we coudl share the same fate as those unfortunates who happened to have the bad luck to live in a place which could not adequately fund their infrastructure.
Haiti has an excuse-they're poor. They cannot afford quality roads and bridges. But we can. And if we are so pennywise but dollar foolish to cut the state's budget toward maintaining our infrastructure, then someday we might get to know what the horror of an unmitigated 6.8 earthquake or bridge collapse can be like.
Turns out it was probably a Teamster.
Like I said, keep fucking that chicken.
But, ol' CNN held onto the Trayvon Martin story and relegated the bridge collapse to a tiny link. No breaking news. No photo. They've corrected the situation this morning, but it was rather sad to see such a major story take a backseat to their scandalmongering.