Bridge collapse in Minn

[mattdavis11]

35 W over the Mississippi collapsed in Minneapolis..

[MRM]

Horrifying. That's my usual way home and 9 times out of 10 I'm on that bridge at 6 pm. Because of the construction on the bridge I took the Hennepin Ave. bridge home tonight. It's longer in distance but quicker when I-35 is under construction. A good friend passed over the bridge at about a quarter to 6. We're all calling around to make sure we're ok.

[Tobra]

pretty incredible, at least 3 dead last I heard

[Dantilla]

Wow. I'm out on the West coast now, but have plenty of family members in the Twin Cities area.

[slakjaw]

I used to take that bridge all the time. Damn!

[URY914]

Have they said how this happened?

[71T Targa]

Last I heard it was a structural failure that may have been caused by the construction that was happening.

[85eurocarrera]

Hope everyone here is o.k.

[speeder]

It's just a mind-blowing tragedy, like most people here I have taken that bridge thousands of times. I rode over the 10th ave. bridge, (right next to it), about 1/2 hour before this happened. Unbelievable...

I rode back down there when I heard the news about the bridge, it was a surreal scene w/ what seemed like hundreds of emergency vehicles, many towing rescue boats. There were just droves of cops and emergency personnel + thousands of people just milling around in a state of disbelief. It was a little like 9/11, though not as bad of course. Still, the biggest disaster ever in this state.

[CurtEgerer]

I spent my early engineering career inspecting bridges. This should be fairly easy for engineers to figure out. From what I can see, the bridge looks to be a somewhat unusual truss design. Many, many bridges in the US are in very poor structural condition - if you crawled under some of these and looked around, you'd be shocked. I'll bet the Federal inspection reports over the years show some significant structural deterioration (i.e. corrosion, fatigue cracks, etc.). All it takes is a failure in one small section to bring the whole thing down with this sort of design. The current construction activity looks to be repaving only. If that's the case, the only potential problem would be unusual loading conditions. Were they stockpiling paving material on the bridge? Did they have heavy equipment concentrated in one area?

[85eurocarrera]

I heard one comment to the fact that since there is construction ongoing, the traffic was more concentrated to fewer lanes. Maybe stressing the bridge out more uneven? I don't know.

[berettafan]

amazing more people weren't killed. one pic i saw appeared to show a cargo type train crushed under the bridge as well.

[85eurocarrera]

Not my comments, but interesting. I cut and pasted this from a bike forum I frequent. Same with the pics.


Thanks Jeff.
Looked it over more carefully and it was actually the girders that were going out of plane. Which would cause allot of undue stress to the main truss. They gave many examples of work they have had to do on the bridge because of the out of plane girders, like drilling holes and refurburshing parts of the on and off ramp to releive stress and re solidify the main truss.

Also it seems like many of the joints were welded, which is not a perferred method compared to rivets or bolts, including in salt heavy enviroments.There where worried about the "high state of corrosiveness" on the joints between the girders and the trusses especially on the east side main truss and south side ramp.

Another telling thing in the report is low grade it got for it's redundancy. Basically all structures have fail safes. If one beam goes the other are able to supoort the new stress. The more fail safes the better the redundacy. This bridge, by definition, had no or little redundacy. Which would mean that if one part of the bridge would fail in any way, not just collapsing, it would shift the new stresses to parts of the brindge that were not able to handle it, those parts would fail and so on and well then the end result would be the bridge would collapse as a whole.

I would be, after reading this report, not a bit surprised that the report will come out about the bridges structure being compromised by shape the bridge was in structurally, mixed with a overload of traffic on one lane and the poor redundacy the design of the bridge portrayed.

Sorry about get into this the way I have. It is part of my job to define structural problems. On a much smaller scale then a bridge, but regardless.

I do not want to take away anything about the seriousness of this event and I do realize all the analyzing of data does not make this any less of a horrible diasaster.

My heart and prayers go out to those people. Keep safe

[CurtEgerer]

"out of plane girders" ?? I'm not sure where he was reading this from - one of the Fed inspection reports maybe?? If that is true and they tried to hold this thing together with bandaids, somebody is in deep, deep *****. There are a lot of bridge types where you can get away with significant deterioration and other problems and still have a reasonable factor of safety - a steel truss type bridge is not one of them!

[speeder]

The blame on this deal will keep lawyers and newspapers in warm mittens for decades to come.

[slakjaw]

They have I-94 cut down to one lane at night right now. All my contractors (and a lot of other people) have been taking 694 to 35 W to avoid the traffic jams which put them over that bridge.

[speeder]

There are two seasons in MN., winter and road construction. This will be a cluster-fuch of epic proportions.

[BGCarrera32]

But hey at least we're getting a $287 million dollar ball park and the light rail fraud on our nickel...nevermind the critical infrastructure. Anybody run 35W N from Hwy 36 out to about Forest Lake (15 mi)? That section of road is so crappy its embarassing...they don't even bother patching the cracks anymore because there's never enough money for it. This whole thing pisses me off because it didn't have to happen.

I really feel and pray for those injured and those who lost there lives in this. What a waste.

[slakjaw]

/rant
I am furious and I feel terrible for those who have died in this thing.

In my line of work I have been to many places and mpls has the worst roads I have ever driven (inside the USA) I am just furious, we pay the second highest taxes in the nation and it takes months to fix potholes on I-94 or anywhere else. IMO neglect is what caused this.

I mean no disrespect for those that have died I am just angry at this point.

/end rant

[BGCarrera32]

Right with ya slak...no disrespect intended here either, but we have a serious "push the problem forward" mentality with the Legislature in this state. Every year its a constant harp on stadiums, K-12, we don't have enough money, blah blah...gettin real old real fast.

I am angry.