Posted on 02/26/2019 9:58:37 AM PST by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
On 14 August last year, the city of Genoa in northwest Italy woke to a strong summer storm. By 11.30am, the rain was so heavy that visibility had fallen dramatically. Videos captured by security cameras show vehicles slowing down as they crossed Morandi Bridge, which grew progressively more enveloped in a grey mist.
A few minutes later, a 200-metre section of the bridge collapsed, including one of its three supporting towers. The tragedy killed 43 people and left 600 homeless.
It also dealt a hammer blow to Italy’s once-proud engineering history – and the country’s confidence in its mastery of a key construction technology: concrete.
A little more than a kilometre long, crossing the Polcevera valley, a river, a railway depot, a densely populated area and several large factories at an average height of 45 metres above the ground, Morandi was one of the longest concrete bridges in the world when it opened in September 1967.
The 1960s were Italy’s boom years. For the first time, many Italians could afford a car. But the country’s roads – many of them narrow, meandering up mountains and twisting through city centres – needed modernising. Morandi Bridge was the centrepiece of a brand-new network of highways connecting Milan and Turin in the north to the tourist hotspots of the Ligurian Riviera, bypassing a congested Genoa and ultimately completing the coastline highway that runs from southern France to Tuscany.
Named after Riccardo Morandi, the engineer who designed it, the new bridge was a multi-span, cable-stayed bridge similar to the Brooklyn Bridge: regular towers, from which a series of exposed steel cables stretched to the bridge’s deck.
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
:)
Yeah we’re a shadow of our old self.
But they did bring over a lot of Sicilians the past 2 decades, esp after 9/11 when the heat was lifted a little.
This generation’s Americans in the mafia grew up in million dollar homes. They don’t want to do prison.
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