FIU pedestrian bridge collapse

Need to get wumpus on this.

Bringing back some terrible memories of the Hyatt Regency skywalk collapse in the 1980s. My brother was then chief resident at the nearest hospital. We were visiting him for the weekend, and didn’t see him–think he was at the hospital for 80 hours straight (napped there when he could).

Bless your heart.

4 dead. More in hospital.

It’s weird how that tragedy just kind of shifted right out of public memory. No one ever talks about it anymore, but until 9/11 it was the deadliest structure collapse in US history. It killed over 100 people and injured another 200 or so. Crazy!

My uncle was a construction engineer back then and he talked about how the Hyatt walkway collapse changed the industry.

Yeah, I’m trying to remember exactly, but I believe the construction crews basically deviated from the original architecture and engineering plans on the skywalks, without consulting those engineers regarding the changes.

EDIT: reading the wikipedia page to refresh my memory, sounds like a double failure between the steel construction folks and the engineers/architects. The initial architecture design had faults, the steel company exacerbated them by deviating, and got approval for those deviations over the phone from an engineer who never even looked at drawings or mockups to approve the changes.

Turns out all that fancy math that engineers do is important.

Okay, apparently they were doing a stress test on the bridge when it collapsed. And they ddin’t think about closing the road down?

WTF???

That’s negligence and I hope they have a good lawyer.

Similar thing happened near Raleigh not long ago

We’ll find out they’re immune to any sort of litigation because of some clause in their deal they signed with the city soon.

Death toll up to 6.

  1. I bet we don’t, and/or
  2. A judge decides that such an (hypothetical) agreement of any sort is null and void anyway.

Frankly, it’ll be a little biit surprising if those involved avoid criminal charges. I mean, they may on that part, but as far as civil litigation goes – and licensing to work as engineers/contractors goes – they’re all done.

I’m betting it comes down to how connected the company is to the local politicians.

Odds are someone on site becomes a fall guy and nothing happens to the company.

eThis is why every large company involved in facilities and construction has a stop work policy, and why little contractors who underbid to get the work make mistakes.

It’s also why these things turn out to be a ring-around-the-rosie to blame. Whose the responsible party? The person ordering the survey, the company tasked with the survey, the actual person in site performing it?

There’s actually a lot of contention in these industries about what exactly being a certified engineer means as far as liability goes. If they “stamp and seal” the work are they, and not the company, to blame? After all what’s the point of certification if the engineer is just another faceless cog in the corporate wheel.

OTOH you can’t sue an engineer for tens of millions of dollars. So small companies try to shift the blame entirely to the engineer in charge of the work. It doesn’t mean they’ll succeed.

IE, my point is that they were running stress tests “after” it had been put into service, and an engineer certified it was good to go without that test, and then sent a crew out later to finish whatever tests they skipped.

As someone who is in construction it is pretty hard to deviate like that without the inspectors being complicit.

Ironically FIU has been at the forefront of this type of design, although they had nothing to actually do with this bridge.

While the accelerated bridge construction process is not well known outside the engineering world, FIU has become a hub for fostering the new approach.

FIU started a center to “advance the frontier” in the field in 2010 after identifying a need for more engineers trained in the method. Since launching in 2011, the center has drawn 4,000 people to its webinars, according to the website. In 2016, it became one of just 20 accelerated building programs nationwide to receive federal funding that amounts to $10 million over five years.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/article205422719.html#storylink=cpy

The Florida Department of Transportation on Friday night released the transcript of a call from an engineer with FIGG Bridge Engineers that the agency got Tuesday. “Calling to, uh, share with you some information about the FIU pedestrian bridge and some cracking that’s been observed on the north end of the span.” The message was left on a land line and not retrieved until Friday.

Of course, if a FIGG engineer called Florida DOT to blow the whistle on this, then it suggests someone else at FIGG or MCM knew and ignored it/covered it up or, at the very least, the engineer had reason to believe it would be ignored (past history?)

Edit: more of the call. Not whistle-blowing as such, apparently:

“From a safety perspective we don’t see that there’s any issue there, so we’re not concerned about it from that perspective,” the engineer said according to the transcript, “although obviously the cracking is not good and something’s going to have to be, ya know, done to repair that.”

Holy shit. Murder charges. There’s no way that can’t happen now.

This company has a long history of crap: