The bridge was qualified as deficiant, not degrading, but what it means is that the bridge is not failing, but is approching the point when upgrades and repairs will be required.
Not to turn this political, but after getting past the shock of it all, and past the emotions felt for the victims, I have gotten down right ****** off. This damn state has been pushing off bridge repairs, road upgrades and many other NEEDED road projects and dumped all the taxes collected into light rail, and other mass transit projects! The Light Rail system has cost double what they first projected, ad has cost over 1 billion to construct, and now just approved a 900k dollar line between St Paul and MPLS. Yet they whine about not having enough money to fix roads. Also, the Light Rail is being subsidised by the state tax dollar because it cant sustain itself on its own, yup, it doesnt generate enough income to pay for itself!
Then, a damn Democrat Congress person has the odacity to blame the Republicans 3 hours... THREE HOURS, after the collapse because they wont get on board to add a higher gas tax to pay for road repairs. BUT, he fails to mention that the tax law that just passed in Nov. that took all vehicle sales tax and put it into a transportaion fund to only be used for trasnportation. BUT, 40%, FOURTY PERCENT, was taken out of the fund and placed into the mass transit account.
I pray to the Lord above that he helps the broken families of this tragic event, but I also pray that the people in this state wake and realize that we have put the "earth and enviroment" ahead of human lives but jepordizing our lives on unsafe roads and bridges, so that we can pack earth friendly people like sardines into a so called eco-friendly train. Sorry, but today I have just gotten more and more ****** off about the situation.
The fact of the matter is that bridge has been undersized for some time now, the 35 Coridor through MPLS has been undersized for way to long, but no one seems to care about fixing it. That bridge should have been replaced 10 years ago, not because of possible failure, but to accomidate the traffic that uses it with a 10 lane bridge but it wasnt. Instead they install traffic control BS at all the onramps to "control the flow of traffic", and fangled up this great idea called light rail.
And people wonder why I hate the city. I have driven on that bridge many times, and truthfully, for some reason that bridge always made me grind my teeth while crossing it, especially in stop and go traffic. And bridges usually dont bother me, hell I drove across that old rickety suspension Royal Gorge bridge... and those of you that have, you know how kinda creepy that is, and that didnt bother me.
Here is your answer as to why it most likely fell like it did... found this on
I-35W Bridge, Minneapolis, MN
A University of Minnesota Civil Engineer in a report to MN-DOT recently noted that this bridge is considered to be a non-redundant structure. That is, if any one member fails, the entire bridge can collapse. A key factor is that there are only four pylons holding up the arch. Any damage to any one pylon would be catastropic. The textbook example of a non-redundant bridge is the Silver Bridge over the Ohio River. It failed shortly before Christmas in 1967 resulting in 46 deaths. A single piece of hardware failed due to a tiny manufacturing defect. But that piece was non-redundant, and the entire bridge collapsed into the icy river. Today, bridge engineers design bridges so that any single piece of the bridge can fail without causing the entire bridge to collapse. It is tragic that the I-35W bridge was built a few years too early to benefit from that lesson.
Basicly, it was designed without any backup, any one beam fails and it all goes down all at once. If you think about it, if one of the arched beams failed close to the middle, it would come down just like that.
Still havent totally grasped this yet.
I wonder though, I noticed that this year, my truck suffered from some serious rust after this winter. I wonder if a change in road treatments might have something to do with this. I know they have experimanted with many different road treatments for ice, but makes ya think sometimes. Plus, this bridge actually had a system for de-icing. Pumped the stuff right onto the bridge using a system of pipes. Maybe a pipe this winter srung a small leak, and over the past year since the last inspection, it acclerated a point to rust abnormally fast, and well, cause what you saw.
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