I-40 Damaged Bridge Shutdown Intentional?
(www.whatdoesitmean.com)
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Found this interesting with the Ultrasound Bursts 1:20 hr/mins before the first 911 call. Bursts emanating from the same coordinates. The 2 audios of 911 calls from the Bridge Inspection crews are at bottom of article.
very interesting
No. There's footage of the crack, and it's pretty huge. The bridge is almost as old as the one that collapsed on I-35 some years back. Any of those mid-20th-century style bridges whose designs are basically heaps of lattice steel on pylons are disasters waiting to happen. They should have all been replaced fifteen years ago.
No disagreement that these old bridges may have needed replacement years ago. My son was 200 yards off the I35 bridge when it collapsed. What appears different here is the ultrasound recorded just prior to the inspection crew finding the “fresh” crack in the beam/girder.
The crack wasn't "fresh".
Doesn't appear to be. There is a picture some photographer took of the bridge in Aug '19 and you can clearly see the crack in that picture, though not as widespread.
Sadly, this bridge was not designed very well and relies on the brute strength of the material it's constructed from to maintain it's form. In fact, that crack is EXACTLY where one could expect to see one because it's right at the most stressed area on the whole design. The "T" shaped metal brackets that hold the main beams and vertical beam together should have been shaped with some sort of taper and/or much longer to better distribute the load on the beams. You can get away with a design like that but you have to use some strong material to overcome the lazy engineering which they tried to do in this case by making the beams out of some huge, stiff steel beams.
The problem with high strength steel is that it's very stiff, but it does not flex very much before that force "cycles" the metal structure. Even if that beam was flawless, the area that it cracked was likely experiencing flex cycles continuously throughout it's life. With steel you usually get around one million cycles before the metal starts to crack and once that happens the crack keeps growing until it cracks all the way through or something else that's no longer being supported fails and leads to a catastrophic failure. Had that beam cracked all the way through it would have been game over for that section, if not the entire bridge.