Posted on 02/02/2020 3:06:37 PM PST by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
The Harris County Toll Road Authority plans to take a three-week pause in construction on the new Houston Ship Channel Bridge along the Sam Houston Tollway so engineers can agree on a solution to a possible design flaw found nearly 20 months into the project.
The $1 billion bridge — the costliest infrastructure project in the county’s history — was designed by the Dallas office of FIGG Bridge Group. The company, based in Florida, came under scrutiny when its Tallahassee office designed a pedestrian bridge that collapsed in February 2018 at Florida International University, killing six. FIGG and its consultants were held responsible for the collapse.
“Errors in bridge design, inadequate peer review and poor engineering judgment led to the collapse of this bridge,” National Transportation Safety Board Chairman Robert Sumwalt said three months ago when findings were released.
Weeks after the collapse, HCTRA officials said they were sticking with FIGG as designers of the new Ship Channel Bridge. Still, last March, Harris County approved a $2.6 million contract with COWI, an international consulting and engineering firm, to review the FIGG designs.
Late last year, COWI approached FIGG with the design concern, and both started working on a solution, said John Tyler, deputy director of the Harris County Toll Road Authority and the agency’s chief engineer. The construction pause, he said, will allow for the two companies to finalize the plan for the solution developed by FIGG and approved by COWI and restart work.
“We wanted to have the design agreed to before we proceeded,” Tyler said.
This is the second delay confirmed on a Texas span so officials could double-check FIGG’s design. In November, despite previously saying it was satisfied by the company’s performance, the Texas Department of Transportation suspended construction of the new Harbor Bridge in Corpus Christi...
(Excerpt) Read more at houstonchronicle.com ...
LOL — “You’ve read your last free article on Houston Chronicle.”
More-detailed redux of Ship Channel Bridge Post from January.
PING!
And when I subscribed, the stupid thing kept saying that. That’s why it took me so long to post. If you can find one of those internet reacharounds for this article, feel free to post the link.
George Costanza: It's simple physics. Calculate the velocity, V, in relation to the trajectory, T, in which G, gravity, of course, remains a constant.
Engineer: Gravity! Forgot about that.
The Houston Comical paper is so bad my parakeet won't even crap on it.
Affirmative Action engineering.
Because numbers are hard. Lots of straight lines and curved shapes, and all those commas and periods when there isn’t a verb or pronoun in sight.
Thank you.
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