Posted on 03/18/2018 6:12:54 PM PDT by reaganaut1
The all-women engineering team that designed the ill-fated pedestrian foot bridge at Miami’s Florida International University were highly touted for their advances in a field that is typically dominated by men.
But critics are pointing the finger of blame at the female engineers for design flaws that may have brought the bridge down.
Investigators are still on the scene of last week’s bridge collapse that killed 6 people and injured 9 on the FIU campus in Southwest Miami.
The investigation is focusing on the work done by a team of all-women engineers who were employed by one of the construction firms that designed and built the bridge.
Munilla Construction Management (MCM), the South Miami-based firm that designed the FIU foot bridge, has been sued multiple times for unsafe practices in the past.
In early March MCM was sued by a construction worker who was severely injured when MCM’s “makeshift bridge” at Miami’s International Airport collapsed.
MCM is a Cuban-American, family-owned Miami company founded in 1983 that employs more than 1,000 people in several states. The company is a federal military contractor for the U.S. Army and Navy.
MCM was awarded the $14.2 million minority contract to design and build the cable-stayed bridge. The company is well-connected in Miami politics and it promotes inclusion and diversity in the workforce.
(Excerpt) Read more at sandrarose.com ...
Youtube video analysis I saw said it was not a design, but a construction, flaw. Don’t know what they’ll figure out but it is WAY too early to tell. There will be plenty of time to point fingers.
Yes there was. Any self-respecting team of feminist engineers wouldn't be caught dead designing anything with a glass ceiling.
On this very site there are people who would tell you it is commonplace. I worked as a rigger and as a pile buck and bridge painter. This design was meant to be supported with cables from a center tower. To allow traffic, including pedestrians within 100ft is insane. Someone should go up for homicide or manslaughter. I would not have worked on that bridge, and I have done some very similar things but only with proper support. Those men on the upper part should have been harnessed to the man lifts or cranes. That bridge was not safe to be worked on, let alone driven under.
She was your go-to gal when you needed something erected, am I right?
According to this lengthy article, NTSB "investigators have confirmed that crews were tightening tensioning cables in a diagonal truss at the north end of the bridge on the day of the collapse."
The article says:
Adjusting tension cables, which ran like tendons through the 950-ton concrete span and the struts that connected a concrete canopy on the bridge to the walkway, can be a delicate operation. Over-tightening the cables, which are used to reinforce the concrete, can have devastating results, the experts say: It might cause torquing, or twisting, that would cause a specific cracking pattern in the concrete on impact with the road, something investigators would likely detect quickly.
If that's what they were doing, why was traffic allowed under the bridge?
I thought of that. It didn’t move at all. They had nothing hooked up yet. I didn’t know about any work being done in the area of the weakened area.
Republican women use laptop computers, Democrat women use abacuses. You decide...
All they need is more government grants and then they will be so much better. Just like the educational system.
I’ll bet the MSM is all over this story.
LOL!
As usual, I have to read Free Republic to hear about things like this.
If you look at that bridge or walkway as it’s called you can see there isn’t a single steel I beam anywhere in that thing. Nor was there any kind of arch underneath it at either end. The whole thing is pre-cast concrete. The support columns they did use are too far apart. In effect what that thing was would be if you took , say and five by three or four foot piece of glass or marble and instead of carrying straight up and down you attempted to have two people carry it flat. The moment you’d do that the glass or marble would break. That’s pretty much what happened here.
All-women engineering teams are to professional engineering practice as Black Churches are to Christianity.
Yes, this company failed ancd failed badly, but lets not dis all women for this.
I suspect OSHA is all over it.
Fall protection Independent from the material supporting systems/cranes is generally required.
The 3-D space frame physical construction might not have matched the intended design. Without looking at calcs, I wouldn’t trust the eccentric truss without intended loading points being field placed at other loading points, especially if curing times for concrete are being rushed.
Eng-tips.com, in the past, has had a strong membership with competent Structural Engineering insight.
I wonder how the pivoted the 950Tn structure without inducing shear in the young concrete.
I wanted to post “Why? Does she have a sister?” But thought better of it.
This means that there will be no consequences...none. The Pu$$y-pass will get them outta this.
Well, since they decided to eliminate the center tower from which the cables play out, there wasn't any need for the stays, right? The cables can't just hang from thin air, eh?
Designed and built by the Humpty Dumpty Engineerettes Company. < /s >
(Sigh)
A few posts back, there is a quote from some engineer that said the bridge is really just a truss bridge, with the elements already in place to support it. The tower and the long diagonals were just for show. (So this guy says....)
If so - that seems really stupid too. Like the 1% or whatever it is that has to be spent on art-work at some of these jobs. At the Sea-Tac (Seattle) third runway (finished a few years ago) there is a retaining wall with millions of dollars worth of engravings on the wall - eagles, killer whales, mountains, etc.
It is along a back service road in the restricted area. The closest the public can get to it are some residential roads on the far side of the airport. You can get peeks of it through the trees. It is still about 500 feet away though.
The root cause of the collapse.
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