Melba's Jammin' wrote:

> > Oops.. I stand corrected. I was looking at a section of bridge in I 35
> > further south. I had zoomed in on a bridge over a narrow band of water that
> > I had assumed was the Mississippi River, but when I looked at it again just
> > now I realized that was not it.
>
> One of the guys on another newsgroup is a self proclaimed road geek and
> he's got pictures of lots of interesting stuff on his site. Here's a
> link with information about the bridge that went down.
> http://www.visi.com/~jweeks/bridges/pages/ms16.html

Interesting link. I am by no means a road geek, but I worked for our
provinces highway maintenance branch for a number of years, starting off in
a highway maintenance yard. In later jobs I spent a lot of time working
with the bridge crews, bridge inspection crews and construction crews. I
took a look at the pictures on that site and the first thing I wondered was
about the weight that was concentrated on just four small concrete
pedestals, and about the low angle on the supporting arch. So it was
interesting to read the author's comments about the non redundant structure
and the inherit danger of failure of a single component leading to a total
failure as there is no redundancy in the support structure.


Having spent a lot of time with the bridge inspectors I came to understand
something about the causes of bridge failure, and the bureaucratic
processes that delay repairs and replacement. People don't realize how
badly in need of repair some bridges are. We have been lucky. People in
Quebec were not so lucky last year when a huge bridge deck collapsed on a
highway in suburban Montreal. There were 5 deaths and a number of injuries
in that one.