An informative video by an (annoyingly youtubey) engineer who explains why and how he thinks the bridge collapsed, based on his analysis of currently available information and footage.
Is there any reason that they couldn’t have done the stress test of the bridge during the night, and maybe closed the road and detoured the traffic? Especially since they’d already observed cracks, from what I’m hearing?
Thanks! Really interesting.
People who know what they’re talking about are kind of fascinating. And I love how he pronounces certain words like “video” and “gauge”.
Oh heck, that’s AvE. I love his stuff. And he’s a Canuck so that explains everything. :)
Really weird; I was in West Miami on business in an area I normally don’t go to on the day this happened. I stopped at a BurgerFi in Miami Beach and saw this on the news, and was like “oh.”
It feels somehow like dodging a bullet although the odds are probably similar to winning the lottery, or something.
No reason at all. Just pure carelessness they didn’t do that.
I’m sure their employees would be annoyed coming in at night.
Also checking a structure for faults in the dark is probably really difficult now that I think about it.
“You see anything?”
“Nope.”
“Well, I guess it’s fine?”
“Sure, I just wanna go back to sleep.”
I don’t really buy that. I’ve seen the kind of lights they can bring to bear at night these days from work they do around here on the freeways during the summer.
It would still be a lot harder if you’re looking for stuff like structural fractures. You’d have to light every inch of everything so there were no shadows anywhere. For lighting a freeway you need enough light to see. You don’t need to look for hairline fractures or anything.
Not that they seemed to give a shit about things they DID see, but that’s a whole other issue. They could have closed the road, which is what anyone rational would have done, but that costs money and obviously anything that costs money isn’t on the table with these people.
Half of our road and bridge construction is done at night with large spotlights. If they can do that here in MI, they certainly could have stress tested this thing at night and closed the road. But that would cost a little extra and be mildly inconvenient.
Have they even said the collapse was related to the stress test?
It may be that there is a difference between setting steel or pouring concrete and trying to measure the relative strength of a bridge when tested.
I do kind of go with the argument that a day time test was probably required. If it wasn’t for the contractor having a previous bridge fail there would probably be no reason to suspect there was any danger involved in testing the bridge.
That doesn’t seem like much of a test then. What’s it for if there’s no danger?
Well, concrete is tested at various stages and that doesn’t mean there is danger. It is done to test the strength and to see that it hits specs.
Why didn’t they mention the Qt3’er who reported on the foulmouthed Canadian?