the real truth on what happened! <object width="425" height="350"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/8jCsWjWzsEw"></param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/8jCsWjWzsEw" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="350"></embed></object>
Pretty surreal watching this on TV last night. My 20 year old sister is staying with me for the summer, and she is from St. Paul, so I had live commentary. Apparently our step-sister lives right across the bridge. None of our family was involved, thankfully. Scary ****.
Too early for jokes like that, Space Ghost. I was going to make a Last Mimzy joke, but... too early. Death toll has been lowered to FOUR. Hospital treated 9 people for injuries. This from http://kstp.com/article/stories/S156920.shtml?cat=1&v=1 . WTF?!?!?!? You're saying that no one could have detected this? There are inspections yearly. Of course it would have been caught.
According to some of the eyewitness reports and reports from the survivors is that it did start to shake like an earthquake just before it collapsed. One eyewitness in apartments overlooking the bridge felt it shake and thought at first it was just a very large truck going over it. I drove it two days ago and didn't feel anything wrong with it. Last Friday I drove across it in a large truck carrying building materials to redo my roof and didn't notice anything either. I'm not a structural engineer but know a little about it from architecture and taking several structures course in college. My own guess, and this is a very speculative guess, is that what happened was that several members of the steel box truss were weakened but still strong enough to hold. One of the members failed near the south portion of the bridge and its load got transformed to weakened members nearby which couldn't handle the new load and the whole south portion fell flat. The weight of the south portion pulled the rest of the bridge down. What weakened the steel in the first place my guess is that the temperature cycle of Minneapolis over years took a toll on the steel. Minnesota over a year temperature can very by more than 130 degrees and in 2007 we had a cold snap in early February with subzero temps for more than week and this summer have had a few weeks with temps over 90. While the last few summers have been hot most of the winters have been mild and we hadn't had a cold snap like we did this winter since 1997. Again making an speculative guess I'm wondering if the cold and the heat stressed the bridge too far. Its not surprising that it happened rapidly since anyone had noticed it was slumping days or hours before it would've been shut down. Some of the latest news here is that there 79 victims at the latest count with 5 still critical and ther are still 20 to 30 people missing. In a Federal inspection in 2005 the bridge there were structural defficiencies. According to the report the bridge only passed 50 of 120 checks that were conducted on it. The news is saying that when defficiencies are found in this sort of check the state is required to make the repairs.
I read that the report stated that the repais could be deferred. Obviously not. I agree that one potential cause might be the temperature swings as that is a lot of expansion and contraction going on with a structure that heavy. The truth is that there are lots and lots of bridges that are in bad shape and there isn't enough money to repair or replace all of those. Here in Texas I've noticed several on HWY 105 that are in bad shape. If I can tell they are in bad shape by driving over them I can't imagine what an inspection would reveal. The ones that come clearly to mind are the bridges between Navasota and Brenham on 105.
Got back from around the bridge. The police have closed off much of the area around the bridge and also the adjacent bridges so its almost impossible to get a good look at the bridge lengthwise. There still are a lot of cars on the bridge and many in the water but recovery efforts are being hampered by the very muddy water and strong currents. Even though the official death toll stands at 4 divers are reporting there are more bodies in cars submerged in the river and there might be some more trapped in the wreckage. Parts of the bridge are still up or standing in a jumble and rescue workers are moving very carefully to avoid further collapse. There is a huge media circus around the bridge and I saw reporters from as far away as Japan covering the story. Its kind of an odd site to see that many reporters and satellite trucks set up in parks and overpasses near the bridge. The NTSB has also announced that they are going to start their investigation and that sounds pretty interesting. Not only are they going to look into how the bridge collapsed they are going to review the history of the bridge to see what was missed in previous inspections and also look into why some cars did better in the collapse than others so not only might there be recommendations for bridge safety but also car safety.
flip saunders almost was 20 yards from getting on the bridge when it fell.... http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/news/story?id=2958945
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcon...tories/080307dnnatbridgewitness.d5ad03d7.html MINNEAPOLIS - Dennis and Jamie Winegar were stuck in late rush-hour traffic when the Mississippi River bridge beneath them began to shake. Their nephew yelled, "It's an earthquake!" "Then we realized the bridge was collapsing," Jamie Winegar said. "Boom, boom, boom, and we were just dropping, dropping, dropping, dropping." Behind the wheel, Dennis Winegar fought to keep their Houston family's Chrysler 300M under control. "I slammed on my brakes and saw something in front of me disappear and then my car pointed straight down and we fell." He estimated they dropped about 50 feet, landing on a smaller car below them. Other drivers were getting out of their cars and trying to help people off the bridge. "Angels is what I call them," Jamie Winegar said. holy crap, i just got a call from my mom about seeing this on the news. i have a friend at UTMB and he has family in minnesota (which i hadn't even thought about) and the people in the story are his parents, who were visiting. that's just crazy, to just happen to be there visiting family and just happen to be on the bridge. luckily they were OK and hopefully the people in the car they fell on are too (it doesn't say anything about them so that would seem to be good).
State by state list of all bridges by county and their rating. MSNBC link I could tell you that many are in bad shape in St. Louis. Many too the naked eye look like they could collapse at any moment.
