EmailIt's a little old, but here's an article from Popular Mechanics about how the I-35 bridge collapse is goading engineers to build stronger bridges.
posted on Fri, 05/30/2008 - 10:50am
More on the Minneapolis bridge collapse
I-35 Bridge Collapse: Curious onlookers view the fallen I-35 structure from the 10th Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis.
Courtesy Mark RyanThe National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is scheduled to make an announcement today regarding the cause of the I-35 bridge collapse in Minneapolis last August.
Fallen I-35 Bridge
Courtesy Mark Ryan
A report in the New York Times says investigators have traced the source of the catastrophic failure to a design flaw in the gussets, the common steel plates that connect the angled beams of many US bridges.
Gusset plate visible in the I-35 bridge wreckage.
Courtesy Mark Ryan
Sources in the report say the gussets used in the Minneapolis span weren’t structurally sound enough to meet safety margins even in the 1960s. Further repairs and renovations over the ensuing decades added even more weight and stress to the structure causing some of the gussets to snap finally. The flaw, according to the NSTB, has not been found in other existing US bridges.
The final report on the cause of the collapse won’t be released for several months, but today’s news conference should shed some light on the direction investigators are moving.
Your Comments, Thoughts, Questions, Ideas
umm this article i so awesome i lovethat were talking about it. but i dont understand what pigeons have to do with this topic?
posted on Wed, 10/15/2008 - 10:59am
I find it interesting that pigeon poop can build up over time in Minnesota. I would have thought with all the rain and snow it would washed away and wouldn't have been an issue. I also think it is funny because humans are usually the one's getting in trouble and not birds who have no sence on what they do most of the time.
posted on Wed, 10/15/2008 - 2:18pm
That is really crazy how the brigde would collapse like that. It must be very old that it had collapse like that and how much people had got hurt and that some people had died from it. I think they need to make our brigde more safer and that it should be more stable.
posted on Mon, 12/08/2008 - 1:02pm
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