Florida International University pedestrian bridge collapse

[brewer]

Is it just me or does anyone else get the feeling that a 950 ton pedestrian bridge is over kill?

[vorlon13]

That's pretty much why I mentioned it.

What kind of budgets do they have for pedestrian overpasses in Florida ?

[Pat Mustard]

Prior to placement over roadway:

You'd think they'd close the road until they had finished putting her up, wouldn't you?

[brewer]

CNN has been showing vid of it collapsing. Looks like a joint failure to me. But I'm no engineer. 

Think I heard that they were in the process of re-tightening support cables.

[c172]

6 fatalities thus far. Some rather alarming documentation of the rescue.

[brewer]

Heard that this bridge was designed to last 100 years. 

Are the designers fucking nuts?

[Brian37]

On all the news channels now.

Spanned 8 lanes of traffic, crushed occupied vehicles, may have had work crew on it at time of collapse.

Major structural failure.  Rescue/recovery operations ongoing.

This is what you get when you put profits over safety. It isn't always good to do things on the quick.

Regardless of the structural failure, it still amounts to not having the proper protocol  and redundancy ahead of time. Or even with those things, an unreasonable demand by the top, that can lead workers to rush. 

Same crap can be said with Wells Faro. That idiot CEO can claim all he wants he didn't know, but he is in charge of what the sales goals are and that climate will cause workers to do things they would not take risks at if they had reasonable conditions.

This climate of "let the rich do whatever they want" lead Duke Energy to dump coal ash. It lead to the dumping of toxic levels of Genex in North Carolina's rivers.

I don't say this as meaning end the private sector. I don't want that at all. But we still have a climate driven by putting profits and shareholders above safety.

[vorlon13]

The Accelerated Bridge Construction technique was apparently developed at FIU to enhance the safety of the work crews in building structures off site and then with advanced equipment, rapidly installing the structures in locations the public doesn't want blocked. Erecting the bridge in place would have subjected workers and traffic to a large construction site on a busy street for however long it took to build it with the attendant problems with motorists gawking at the project overhead and having fender benders, dropped tools, lane blockages, temporary supports in traffic lanes, cribbing, protective barriers, etc.

As of yet, we don't know if the collapse is due to a design error, faulty materials, equipment issues, sabotage, geological issues under a pier, etc. Jumping to 'profit motive' as an issue seems really premature now. It looks like FIU wanted a really expensive bridge there, not a cheap one.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

  It looks like FIU wanted a really expensive bridge there, not a cheap one.

And that would have meant a large profit for someone. 

[vorlon13]

Not much profit in failure.