Collapse of the Fern Hollow Bridge
ntsb.gov
ntsb.gov
I hadn't thought about bus cameras capturing the collapse -- wonder if this'll ever be released (or leaked)?
If that's true, my guess it that the mainstream media is aware of it and will have copies of the video.
There is simply too much infrastructure to maintain, and more and more stuff is being built every day with no realistic plan for long-term maintenance. It's a losing battle.
Let the people who like dense towns live there, and stop trying to tell the rest of the people how to live.
Strong Towns also tries to creates cities where no one from the outside ever comes in, since there's no way of getting there (no parking, not enough roads).
People in large cities also like to "get away" during the summer - but there will be nowhere to go in his world.
Also, labor costs have gone up dramatically due to a variety of factors. Increased safety standards, less supply of labor relative to demand, increased liabilities due to tort laws, etc.
Also, borrowing from the future to build today is easy when population is exploding and you know everyone is having 3+ kids which will expand the tax base. That has not been true for quite a few decades now, with tax bases declining in many areas and political appetite for subsidizing those areas is waning, in my opinion.
Less future growth means more restrained borrowing today. There is also a significant and increasing amount of the country’s resources being spent on keeping old people alive that was not the case when all the old infrastructure was built.
To read more in general check out https://infrastructurereportcard.org/infrastructure-categori.... Bridges with rust is normal, but there is a replacement schedule.
I suspect that if that was the primary cause of the collapse, the NTSB would have mentioned it directly already.
Either way, we'll know eventually.
And with auto industry going to toward EVs, vehicles are only going to get heavier, not lighter. The upcoming Hummer EV will be 9000 lbs [2] for example. This bridge seems awfully under-spec'd for its purpose. Someone please tell me that I am interpreting this number wrong.
[1]: https://www.bankrate.com/insurance/car/average-car-weight/ [2]: https://www.google.com/search?q=hummer+ev+weight
An Audi A6 weights 4500 lbs, Tesla Model S LongRange is 4800 lbs, Honda CRV is 3500 lbs, Honda Odyssey Minivan is 4600 lbs, Ford Explorer is 5000 lbs, even a Ford Expedition is "only" 5600 lbs.
What passenger vehicles are in the range of 9000 lbs?
A 2018 Ford F350 Super Duty dually is about 8000#, add at least 3000# of cargo, your already at 11k#.
The problem is the insurance model which insure the vehicle rather than the driver. Thus why some people daily drive their pickup because maintaining another beater is too much cost.
Every now and then their 5' 100lb wife will use that truck to go for groceries and then you'll see them there, because you have no life in the real world, and you'll judge them based on that single interaction alone.
Meanwhile, the next day, her hubby and the family will tow an 8000lb boat to enjoy the lake, and heck they can even stop at the hardware store pick up a couple 1000lb of concrete / 2x4 for their home improvement projects.
I've personally saved a few grands this year in various fees alone by being able to haul shit and do DIY home improvements.
But sure, that's only for social grand-standing...
It’s a side-issue, but I see this type of statement all the time about “Europe” and have to say, in Sweden - and even on the suburban streets of Stockholm - these enormous American pickups and SUVs are amazingly common (although most of them don’t go over the 3500kilo limit).
I bet most not even go over 2000kg. My SUV is 1900kg (4k lbs) and is hybrid so has extra weight due to batteries. I think it's a very heavy car and considering downgrading again.
Cars over 4000 kg is straight insanity
Work vehicles in Stockholm are mostly small vans.
I'm not sure we're living in the same US ...
1. Ford F-series
2. Ram pickup
3. Chevrolet Silverado
1. Volvo S/V60
2. Volvo XC40
3. Volvo XC60
How about we agree that we just don't have the same lifestyle ?
Now, if you want to legislate my freedom away, now I do have a problem with that and we will not be friends.
Why would you start a civil war over it?
I'm sure that externalizing environmental costs is attractive, but that just ensures that no one is going to optimize for it.
Many times, you are not free to set the price of goods, especially in today socialist / regulated economy. Your costs go up, your margins profit go down. There is so much you can squeeze. Heck, DEF sounds nice to save the environment & all, but when your combine three a DEF code and pretty much blew your engine 400 miles from the nearest dealership right during harvest before a storm, goes into limp mode and prevent you from harvesting, you're literally fucked, your all farm might even go bankrupt. Don't even count on insurance to save your ass, because you already had to cut back to focus on other coverage to mitigate skyrocketing fertilizer costs, which doesn't matter anyway because the price you'll sell your production 6 month from now has been set a thousand mile away by a white collar asshole right after his daily jerk off and line of coke. But what a beer sipping urbanite would know of actual hard constraint while at the same time, accusing us of social grand standing. Just GFY.
You pretend yourself smart, but you're not. You sound like Marie Antoinette "let them eat cake". Next thing you know, your head hang on a spike in front of an angry mob.
A DEF code is not the only thing that can make a combine fail, and if you're one mechanical failure away from bankruptcy, it's not the DEF that's the problem.
We (my direct family and I to some extend as well) haul your food, your mail, we build the infrastructure and mine the ore you rely on.
Don't fuck with us, because we'll be happy to make you pay. What happening in Canada right now is just the beginning.
If the price of fuel goes up because it includes a carbon tax, then of course the price of whatever service you're providing will go up too.
You ain't gonna move that shit with a Citroen C2.
Also, it's not just a matter of payload. The bigger wheelbase and larger tires make them much more drive able in snow or mud or ice which is common weather around. Small cars are a safety issue on black ice.
Btw, I'm a small player.
And FWIW, I grew up in rural Indiana (USA), soybean and corn country. It's definitely not just professionals driving these vehicles. Actually I'd say most trucks on the streets growing up were NOT used by professionals, the real farm trucks were often barely street legal and could never seem to get past 30-40 mph with a load (or without heh).
You don't need an iphone when a 10 that's old piece of crap hardware does the same job (albeit much less efficiently).
But the problem is that YouPeople(TM) (as opposed to you personally) won't be happy about it. Instead of screeching about the environment you'd be screeching about safety. But it's not really about the environment or safety, it's about class. The fact of the matter is that moving any sizeable amount of goods (like some plywood for a garden shed, or a new stove, or similarly mundane things) with a car or crossover just doesn't pass for acceptable behavior for the slice of society that we're talking about here. People need more vehicle than they "need" for the same reason a 30yo finance professional "needs" a couple sets of nice clothes. It's what his peers expect from him. The quirky college professor can haul a sailboat on the roof of his prius and the tweaker won't be bothered for running scrap with a minivan but outside of that it's just not what "nice people" do (not that either of them care about the opinions of the kind of people who deride them). Meanwhile white collar people with three kids won't even shove them in a crossover once a week if they can avoid it. They'll commute in a 3-row SUV that costs twice as much to operate instead.
People buy crew cab trucks and 3-row SUVs because YouPeople(TM) expect them to "act their income" and they "need" the capability of these vehicles often enough to justify it.
I'm self-aware enough to realize that this is because of a larger cultural struggle in the US between "rural" and "urban". It's not quite that simple, but that's a close enough approximation for the conversation at hand.
The rural people on the US feel like we are constantly fighting a system in which we have no voice. We're subject to regulations that we feel to be frankly ridiculous; regulations that get in our way, make our lives more difficult and expensive, and most of all... don't even serve the purpose for which they were ostensibly designed.
In that context, the GP's response to your comment is understandable.
I'm afraid that you are guilty of what psychology would call "projection". Unless you can back your views with hard facts. I have yet to meet anyone just blowing away $100k on a truck that don't NEED.
I'm afraid you're projecting your own issues on others...
Sure, there are a lot of people who own trucks that don't use them as trucks on a regular basis - but there are a lot of people who do.
It was so heavy that when he took it home, he couldn't drive it all the way home, he had to park it a half mile away and walk because there was a bridge with a 10 ton weight limit that he couldn't cross.
They're certainly licensed the same in my state.
> The posted weight limit on the bridge was 26 tons.
Is it just me or does this weight to length limit seem incredibly low? That articulated bus empty likely weighs 20 tons. An artic bus plus a few cars is already well over the 26 ton limit. I'm sure this bridge has also seen a fair share of truck abuse as the abysmal weight limit combined with the likelihood that truckers only see the weight limit once they're at the bridge with no way to turn around and no easy bypass route so they say screw this and drive their >26 ton rig right over it.
The bridge suffered a fatal compromise but stood with light traffic. Until some combination of speed and weight of the bus pushed it over the edge. Something happened in the minutes or hours before the collapse and it was doomed to fall.
I'm really curious what could have happened to cause it to collapse so catastrophically when it withstood far more traffic just ~12 hours earlier.
Maybe the bus wasn't supposed to cross that bridge?
The bridge was 136m long, by about 13m wide and assuming 2.5cm of water content:
136m * 13m * .025m = 44 m^3 of water, or 44,000 kg, roughly 50 US tons.
A newspaper report said there was a light snow with 1 or 2 inches accumulated since 2am the morning of the collapse. Photos of the scene showed grass and small rocks on the ground visible through the snow, so it doesn't seem like there was a lot of snow on the ground. Even if there was heavy snow a couple days before the collapse, most of it would have been plowed off, I don't see big berms of snow on pictures of the collapse.
So if there was just a couple inches of snow, then it was probably closer to 10 tons worth of snow.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/28/us/pittsburgh-bridge-collapse...
10 lb/ft * 450ft * 45ft / 2000 = ~100 tons
If prior NTSB reports are any predictor, we'll eventually learn all about the confluence of things that led to the collapse.
Perhaps a freeze thaw cycle that split one to many bolts?
I know it's sometimes used as a fancy cladding material, but I'm assuming thats all?
Some pictures of Corten steel structures:
https://www.corten.com/what-is-corten-steel.html
I'm familiar with the structures shown in that link. The U.S. Steel Tower seemed to be holding up well when I worked there, although looking out some windows you could see slightly worrying depressions in the steel beams where water had pooled over the years, and the steel had rusted away a bit (leading to more pooling). The Delaware footbridge was constructed much more recently and still looks new - no signs of wear that I've noticed walking across it.
If Corten steel is not durable enough for structural use, we're in trouble. It's used quite a bit, at least in the northeast.
There is no information: on state, maintenance, geologic activity, or initial failure point.
While interesting any claim of cause is at absolute best an “educated guess”.
There are parts of bridges where any failure would be expected to cause complete collapse, like the cracked beam on the Hernando de Soto bridge (happily that span turned out to not actually be critical). But as the Hernando de Soto bridge showed you can have a complete failure of a major structural element without a collapse (in this case we’re lucky that accidentally happened).
So if the report says that none of the instant fail section were responsible I’m going to trust that.
You cant squeeze blood from a stone.
We know what that "fracture critical" components of a structure through analysis of the design. So what the NTSB is saying here is that none of the components of this bridge that were identified as being fracture critical are the cause of failure.
Of course that doesn't mean there wasn't a single component failure, it is possible that there was an error in the analysis and a fracture critical component was not identified. Alternatively an error in construction could result in weaknesses in the structure leading to more fracture critical components.
It's also possible there were existing failures in non-fracture critical components that had not been detected, in which case you are getting closer and closer to every component being critical.
The somewhat larger New River Gorge bridge is also made from that type of steel.[1]