Another Engineer warning turned down... and people dies.

[floobydust]

Again they're saying the Genoa Morandi bridge failed due to engineering. Blame the engineers- not the politicians, not the neglect, not the maintenance company etc.

"And two years ago, Antonio Brencich, a professor of engineering at the University of Genoa, said in an interview with the broadcaster Primocanale, “the Morandi Bridge is a failure of engineering.”

"It was affected by extremely serious corrosion problems linked to the technology that was used (in construction). [designer] Morandi wanted to use a technology that he had patented that was no longer used afterwards and that showed itself to be a failure," said Brencich to Radio Capitale.

The bridge may have been impossible to maintain. There's not much you can do for rebar, besides cathodic protection, to slow corrosion.

But a 50 year lifetime for a concrete bridge?

[metrologist]

Isn't that indeed an engineering failure?

[helius]

[mcinque]

Zucca, please: we shouldn't make speculations now that some bodies are still buried.

Other than we do not have civil engineering experience, you should take in big consideration that a single engineer opinion, a university professor, is much different from multiple and active Nasa engineers opinions.

The man you mentioned didn't specify the single point of failure in his post (the opposite to what the Nasa's engineers had always done) but has simply wanted to put the entire bridge and his engineer in a bad light, telling only that the entire site "should be rebuilt", and that "his calculations weren't correct", arguing about some difficulties during the construction.

But the most disgusting thing is that he just ran today to be phisically on the spot, right 15 hours later next to the accident site, to be interviewed by the news and tell that he knew that will happened: I cannot avoid to see in this behavior the willingness to show off deliberately and I cannot accept this while bodies are still under the concrete.

He doesn't deserve the attention the media are giving to him and the victims does not deserve this kind of disrespect.

[langwadt]

Isn't that indeed an engineering failure?

the short lifetime of the bridge is engineering failure, not fixing it when it is know that it is an engineering failure is a political failure

[Kjelt]

a dutch bridge "expert"  yesterday said that these so called "cable-stayed bridges" (if I translated it correct from dutch that is) before half 80's were always designed with a single cable/concrete because they could not calculate the strength of multiple cables before that. They were manually calculated.
With the arrival of the PC in the 80s this changed and all bridges from that time forward had multiple cables.

The reason is that a single cable stayed bridge is very volatile due to the single point of failure.
If the cable weakens and breaks the pilon gets unbalanced and unstable as well.
The unbalanced force from the other "cable" sides will let it break down (as we have seen here).
With a multiple cable bridge, if one cable breaks the other cables are calculated to take the strength till the other cable is repaired again.
This is according to him well known and all single cable bridges in the Netherlands are under extreme quality control for failures due to this.
They actually should be replaced in the coming decades.
Italy has many of these bridges so he said they have a huge challenge for the coming years.

[rsjsouza]

Again they're saying the Genoa Morandi bridge failed due to engineering. Blame the engineers- not the politicians, not the neglect, not the maintenance company etc.

"And two years ago, Antonio Brencich, a professor of engineering at the University of Genoa, said in an interview with the broadcaster Primocanale, “the Morandi Bridge is a failure of engineering.”

"It was affected by extremely serious corrosion problems linked to the technology that was used (in construction). [designer] Morandi wanted to use a technology that he had patented that was no longer used afterwards and that showed itself to be a failure," said Brencich to Radio Capitale.

The bridge may have been impossible to maintain. There's not much you can do for rebar, besides cathodic protection, to slow corrosion.

But a 50 year lifetime for a concrete bridge?

Well, it is an engineering problem if it was miscalculated. The media could also conflate and call it "engineering" if the bridge had in fact building problems (materials, procedures, etc.) - they would still be on the shoulders of the responsible engineer, although the building company would have its large share of guilt as well.
IMO you could blame politicians only if they did not take the action (or were not convinced by other technical committees) to allocate the resources for repair, lined their pockets with the allocated money or simply awarded the maintenance contract to an incompetent company (the one who gave the most kickback).
If the NYT is to be believed (I didn't read other sources), it seems the bridge was crumbling partially in bits and pieces - something that happens in several older bridges in cities in the US as well and could be blamed on everyone, really (either a shoddy design or building or lack of proper resource allocation).

[Kjelt]

Well, it is an engineering problem if it was miscalculated. 

It was calculated correctly or it would have failed earlier.

The corrossion was not taken into account which are new insights that are gathered over time.
When the corrossion was detected and no action was taken that is where the problem is.
If there was no possibility to repair the bridge to its standards then they should have replaced it.

[rsjsouza]

Fair enough; I posted before looking into the history of the whole thing. 50 years is quite a long time.

[besauk]

 
The Columbia case is more troubling.  They could have done an inspection flyby and ISS crew would have been able to report the extent of the damage.  Nothing has been reported about analysis of the possibility of returning to the ISS and sheltering after a negative report.  Perhaps someone did an analysis and determined that there wasn't enough life support to keep them going until another shuttle could be launched (which would have had the same risk of damage to the tiles).  Keeping them there until the problem was fixed was clearly impossible (it took many, many months as I remember).  Similar analysis might have shown that Soviet launch and return capability wasn't enough to get them down (could only get two at a time down without depending on the not so reliable automatic docking system so it is many trips).

Perhaps even more troubling is that the root cause was apparently known for many missions prior to the final one - the reformulated (Freon-free) foam on the external fuel tank had caused a marked increase in damage to the insulating tiles, as far back as missions in late 1997 - some 5 years earlier.  Sad to say to some engineers must have succumbed to this politically correct foam nonsense and not stood up as they should have.  Disturbing that what had once been a premiere engineering jewel got turned into a place where the overall culture no longer espoused engineering excellence above all.

[metrologist]

Isn't that indeed an engineering failure?

the short lifetime of the bridge is engineering failure, not fixing it when it is know that it is an engineering failure is a political failure

The politicians were engineered into a corner and they did not want to pay to get out of it. Now they pay a big price for their failure to act.

We know of many such situations and there will still be no action.

[In Vacuo Veritas]

I get sick looking at that. This is the species that should spread to the stars?

[ignator]

I do not understand comparing the failure of this bridge to any complex space craft failure. The level of safety analysis is totally different. The fault tree for a space shuttle is a mega document, for this bridge, insignificant.
There have been other bridge collapse in recent years either from incorrect maintenance, or build errors.The one I remember was the Interstate 35W bridge in Minneapolis Minnesota USA. This failure happened in 2007;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-35W_Mississippi_River_bridge
There are many documented in a wiki article. Filter those caused by external cause vs. structural failure:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bridge_failures
I would be concerned if the Mafia was involved in short changing the quality of the concrete during its construction. I don't hear that as a possible reason, only that the current maintenance company is being held liable. Even without a mafia, contractors and sub-contractors can mess with concrete quality, as well the failure of the government engineers to inspect, and be on the job every moment, taking samples independent of the contractor. And then actually testing them for compression failure strength at the 30 day cure time.In my ignorant view only seeing photos on TV and internet, the concrete appears to have failed in compression. (it falling down is a big hint to this failure  But seeing how it separated into pieces as if the steel rebar was not made to be contiguous, indicates a construction flaw, I would have to see the ends of the rebar to determine if they failed under tension, or if they are intact). If there is no salt or other corrosive material used on the bridge, concrete that is properly made gets stronger with age. My memory is of an asymptotic curve where it reaches final strength at 40 years or more.

[Miyuki]

We have also one bridge collapse some time ago (thankfully no deaths)
And few week after they started to close one bridge by one and repairing everywhere even take some down a building new ones, now is every second road closed and you cant get anywhere but hope it will be safe for some time

Is is common as you see bridge as something for ages, huge and stable monument what will be here for generations even with no maintenance
After disaster everyone wake up and catch up all maintenance neglected for decades

[filssavi]

I say that it is extremely comfortable to just blame the contractors/mafia/politicians in this case, since the original designers and engineers are in my opinion to blame here...

It is quite easy to see that the bridge design had several major flaws:
1) The bridge has very few stays, four for each pylon (one for each of the side of the road for each side of the pylon), while in a perfect world this is enough, in the real world,  it is very dangerous since there is no redundancy at all. In fact in the 90' on the other side of the bridge one of the stays was reinforced with steel reinforcements since it could not be replaced
2) the stays are made of reinforced concrete, even with steel reinforcement this material is not ideal for almost pure tension loads

most of the cable stayed bridged in fact have a very different structures that adress these two weaknesses
1) they have a lot of stays for each tower, this provides greater redundancy, since in case of failure of one or two stays the other can still support the bridge safely, this allows also the entire replacement of a damaged stay (there is no need for bolt on reinforcing)
2) the stays are universally made of steel, since this material is much less shitty in tension compared to concrete

So while I'm almost sure that with better monitoring/maintenance this tragedy could be avoided we have to be onest and recognise also the failure of the engineers who ultimately green lit the project without recognising/adressing there faults

[Paul Moir]

the reformulated (Freon-free) foam on the external fuel tank had caused a marked increase in damage to the insulating tiles, as far back as missions in late 1997 - some 5 years earlier.

Except the piece that broke off and damaged the RCC panel wasn't made with the reformulated foam.

[In Vacuo Veritas]

The level of safety analysis is totally different.

We noticed.



My point is that some people think building a SPACE ELEVATOR is just a question of buying the right epoxy at Home Depot. 

[nctnico]

Well, it is an engineering problem if it was miscalculated. 

It was calculated correctly or it would have failed earlier.

The corrossion was not taken into account which are new insights that are gathered over time.
When the corrossion was detected and no action was taken that is where the problem is.
If there was no possibility to repair the bridge to its standards then they should have replaced it.

Agreed. In the Netherlands bridges get inspected regulary and during the past few years quite a few bridges have been closed for heavy traffic in order to repair the bridges. New insights probably led to a different method of inspecting which brought up lurking problems.

[floobydust]

You need zero qualifications to be a manager or politician. Any background will do.

At some point engineers need to stop being the fall guy for these large failures- where the engineers were starved of time, money, resources to do a good job, and the bridge comes crashing down.

[Echo88]

The level of safety analysis is totally different.

We noticed.



My point is that some people think building a SPACE ELEVATOR is just a question of buying the right epoxy at Home Depot. 

You dont have a point. Nobody said anything about a space elevator. Please go back to your thread and troll the ever-living-shit out of people there or maybe do something better with your time on this mortal plane as you suggested yourself.

[Jeroen3]

A parking garage collapsed last year. It was not finished yet, but it shed some light on poor practices, resulting in the reclassification of some buildings.

Forcing the price down causes safety inflation.

And you know what it said: "if you don't plan maintenance, the equipment plans it for you".
Now they have to build a new bridge, several years downtime and negative economic effect, what would be more expensive? Maintenance or New bridge?

[Eka]

what would be more expensive? Maintenance or New bridge?

Maintenance, meh. New bridges are big sexy projects that employ lots of people. 

[razberik]

Now they have to build a new bridge, several years downtime and negative economic effect, what would be more expensive? Maintenance or New bridge?

There is never enough time to build something properly. But there is always enough time to start building it again.

[JPortici]

Interesting that this is Italy. There seems to be some tension between the engineers and politicians?

We are currently governed by two parties, the greens that feed on fear of lazy napoletans albanians romanians roms migrants from africa (seriously, not many years ago their ads showed a redskin with the caption "they accepted immigration, now they live in reservations") and the yellows feed on ignorance. Dismiss experts because they are payed by the big companies, their experts are the right ones. alternative medicine. alternative science (luckily the greens are more rational types and are saying no to most of their bullshit but still...)

Our prime minister (supposedly an attorney, he also declared himself attorney of the italian people after he was chosen) said in an interview that we can't wait for the justice system to make an investigation, as it would take too much time. wow.

actions must be taken now, before there is even an hint of an investigation say the two vice-prime ministers (the actual prime ministers). that made me even more sick that when they usually talk. the yellow bufoon is the minister for work, he never had a real job in his life before becoming a politician.

Finger crossing that they will collapse on themselves before they do too much damage. That's enough politics for the day for me.

[Kjelt]

Politics has changed dramatically since 40 years. Before the politicians were making multiple years strategies for the country, trying to set the roadmap where to go. Nowadays they need to respond on day to day media-fires within 24hrs show their face when needed and have an answer ready.
So I don't blame them for saying they are taking actions because if they did :
- good investigation into this accident and wait for the results
- shut down all similar constructed bridges and investigate their condition
etc. etc. your economy and store-supplies would have a severe impact, not too mention panic and other side effects.

It is a very lousy problem to have on your plate IMO, there is no good quick fix or solution to deal with it.