Dr. Furface
One small step for me
You don't think they would have braked hard?!
Genoa bridge collapse -14th August, dozens feared dead
- Thread starter agricola
- Start date
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
As I say, they made it, the lorry can be seen on the bridge in other post-collapse photos
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
I neither know nor - frankly - do I much care
Wonder if it could be one of those big construction projects the Mafia often ran, with associated poor building standards and dodgy concrete? Big construction contracts are / were a huge source of funds for the mob. Just a thought.
35 dead now
35 dead now
Indeliblelink
\......👁&👁......./
Although not on the scale of this disaster but there have two other fatal road bridge collapses in Italy within the last two years.
Bahnhof Strasse
Met up with Hannah Courtoy a week next Tuesday
Wonder if it could be one of those big construction projects the Mafia often ran, with associated poor building standards and dodgy concrete? Big construction contracts are / were a huge source of funds for the mob. Just a thought.
35 dead now
Northern Italy not so mafia-ary as the south. Old bridge, seemingly undergoing some kind of maintenance...
petee
no gods, no malarkey
editor
hiraethified
spanglechick
High Empress of Dressing Up
I read there have been 12 other bridge collapses in Italy since 2004, almost all due to poor maintenance.
Dogsauce
I’ve got Skol but I’m not a Scholar
When I did my Civil Engineering degree we seemed to get shown footage of the Tacoma Narrows bridge collapse about once a month in some lecture or another, it’s pretty much etched in my brain. Occasionally we’d get the Hyatt Regency walkways collapse.
It’s sad that there seems to be many more recent examples of engineering failures to choose from now, this one, that footbridge in Florida being recent examples.
It’s sad that there seems to be many more recent examples of engineering failures to choose from now, this one, that footbridge in Florida being recent examples.
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
this roman bridge in spain is an auld bridge
the bridge in genoa wasn't even 50 years auld.
Bahnhof Strasse
Met up with Hannah Courtoy a week next Tuesday
I'm guessing that bridge probably doesn't carry the same loads as the one that collapsed.
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
it'd be a great pity if italian bridge building now was worse than it was 1900 years ago.
SpookyFrank
A cheap source of teeth for aquarium gravel
1900 years ago they didn't have EU-enforced austerity preventing them from investing in infrastructure.
Favelado
J'adore South Shore
I went to Segovia the other day. The aqueduct there looks like it was built last week and is indeed 1900 years old.
Flavour
hang the bankers
I hate the EU but to blame this on EU-enforced austerity is completely ridiculous. Corruption, cronyism, nepotism and gross negligence by Italian State actors are to blame way before the EU is. It lets the Italian Ministry of Transport off the hook. Italy consistently ignores the EU's budget police.
Spymaster
Plastic Paddy
Same as the Pont du Gard but in fairness all of these Roman structures have been rebuilt/remodelled a few times in the last 2000 years, no longer carry massive loads and are probably better maintained as tourist attractions than many modern, functional structures.
Isn't that the fascist salvini's line?
Treacle Toes
Time
It is an amazing sight/thing. Stunning and wonderful.
2hats
Dust.
Quite likely this is down to a design flaw with this particular type of bridge (not only weakening the structure, but also hampering maintenance, assuming authorities were willing to stump up sufficient money for such in the first place). This much has been noted in the engineering literature for some years.
The Morandi bridge designs (he was an Italian engineer and designed several similar bridges) tend to feature very few stays:
Elegant but increasingly risky as the bridge ages - there is no safety net and repair/replacement of the stays is incredibly difficult and expensive. Modern designs use curtains of stays (eg the new Forth Queensferry Crossing) so the failure of one or two cables/stay anchors is highly unlikely to lead to a cascading failure and those that need replacing can easily be swapped out without significantly heightening the risk of failure nor requiring a lot of costly hoop jumping to achieve.
Speculative: the initial driver for the Morandi/Polcevera collapse event - some combination of the prevailing storm (wind loading in a microburst?), ageing infrastructure (rust burst weakening the concrete through undesigned-for tensions), maybe additional holiday traffic load, perhaps even an accident on the deck (poor visibility, wet surface) immediately weakening and tipping a stay into failure? (edit: Also, it used prestressed concrete, so ready to give in a big way if the stays/tendons fail.)
Anyone who has driven round the roadways that spaghetti around Genoa in recent years will have noticed how unloved they are, as are a number of other items of transport infrastructure in some other Italian regions.
The Morandi bridge designs (he was an Italian engineer and designed several similar bridges) tend to feature very few stays:
Elegant but increasingly risky as the bridge ages - there is no safety net and repair/replacement of the stays is incredibly difficult and expensive. Modern designs use curtains of stays (eg the new Forth Queensferry Crossing) so the failure of one or two cables/stay anchors is highly unlikely to lead to a cascading failure and those that need replacing can easily be swapped out without significantly heightening the risk of failure nor requiring a lot of costly hoop jumping to achieve.
Speculative: the initial driver for the Morandi/Polcevera collapse event - some combination of the prevailing storm (wind loading in a microburst?), ageing infrastructure (rust burst weakening the concrete through undesigned-for tensions), maybe additional holiday traffic load, perhaps even an accident on the deck (poor visibility, wet surface) immediately weakening and tipping a stay into failure? (edit: Also, it used prestressed concrete, so ready to give in a big way if the stays/tendons fail.)
Anyone who has driven round the roadways that spaghetti around Genoa in recent years will have noticed how unloved they are, as are a number of other items of transport infrastructure in some other Italian regions.
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SpookyFrank
A cheap source of teeth for aquarium gravel
What's his line on what colour the sky is? What, ultimately, is your point?
2hats
Dust.
It’s the A10 (E80) motorway - most motorway in Italy is pay-as-you-go toll. Though charges can tend to disappear as one heads further south. The only bit I recall driving on that was ‘toll free’ was in Sicily where no one bothered to staff the booths and there were no automated means of payment collection (can’t think why!
).
Dogsauce
I’ve got Skol but I’m not a Scholar
I suspect 1960s Italy didn’t have enough slave labour to construct a 50m high motorway bridge out of traditional stone masonry, hence a more efficient structural method was used. Shame, it might have been quite pretty.
Favelado
J'adore South Shore
Don't like your definition of efficient in the circumstances.
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