Posted on 05/13/2021 5:33:08 AM PDT by GailA
The I 40 M Bridge going into AR from TN is out of commission, it spans the Mississippi River, NO Trucks, Cars, NO Boat traffic. Won't take long food, oil, and other necessities run low or out. https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fthememphian.blob.core.windows.net%2Fsized%2F54486_960&f=1&nofb=1
Because Blue City Controlled Memphis neglected a known crack for years till a Novice could see the crack in the pillar holding up the bridge. Major Artery for traffic. Traffic backed up miles.
With the amount of traffic across it, is by God's grace it Didn't collapse.
50 year old bridge audio into 911
Apparently the Nation is just one Insurrectionist with a Plasma Cutter from disaster.
Plasma Cutters should be Regulated by ATF.
I bet it was broken during the obama years and not a penny of the money to fix everything was spent on fixing anything.
Mules are stupid. Stop acting like one.
Incongruities.... GMAFB.
This past Christmas, I received an iPad Air from my daughter & her family to go with my computer collection...
I tried using it a lot, but that same problem drove me crazier than normal..
So now, unbeknownst to them, my iPad is used exclusively for Wazing while driving, Amazon Music, and FaceTime...
At my age, apples are tough to eat... Unless they are in an apple pie...
They don't want another bridge collapse like the Morandi bridge in Italy that killed 43 people or the I35 bridge collapse in Minnesota. The engineering firms aren't going to slap a patch on the problem and figure out what is going on later. They will get sued out of existence if something goes terribly wrong. The I35 bridge collapse was a combination of a design flaw and neglect by MDOT. We will have to wait and see what they do about the Memphis bridge, but I suspect they will find major problems and the bridge won't reopen anytime soon. Evidently, the bridge has gone through periods of retrofitting since 2000 to handle ~8.0 earthquakes. That may require extra analysis of what went wrong.
Hmmm. Some actual and useful infrastructure projects that can be done.
I have never communicated with you before, but I already feel like we are married. Nitwit, I acknowledged this two or three times before you posted to me. Get over yourself... you are a bozo.
No doubt about it... who knows how many thousands of years of human life will be wasted in traffic and how many people will die in additional traffic mishaps because we live in a risk averse society. Interesting that this seems to be fine with you, while others such as myself recognize this as the complete BS that it is.
We have a bunch of old bridges near where we live that have been closed to traffic not because they have deteriorated, but because they were built during a time period when seismic risks were not considered to the same extent that they are now. Never mind that these bridges went through several major quakes with no problems. They haven't torn them down and they let people walk across them. Does this make sense to you?
No. Here in the land of bankrupt Illinois IDOT engineers will often place load limits for bridges in disrepair. Back to the Memphis bridge. The 60 year I74 bridge going into downtown Peoria was shutdown for 6 months last year for a planned upgrade. Some structural steel and the roadbed was replaced. I am guessing the Memphis bridge will be out of action for at least that amount of time.
I do ultrasonic testing on my die plates all the time before I start to machine them now. The amount of internal fractures we’ve been seeing has steadily been rising, but that is because our plates aren’t from known sources anymore I think.
For a piece of hot rolled beam or welded tubing to have a fracture in it during manufacturing and not caught is not common, but it does happen and I’ve seen it. Put that initial fracture on a high-load high-resonating structure and it’s definitely going to fail eventually. Doesn’t mean the whole bridge is in need of repair, but judging from the rust on that break it’s been there for a long, long time and finally just catastrophically failed I think.
It is the same break.
Add double sided Velcro straps and you’re good.
You are a little late to the party. This has been hashed out through multiple posts.
One inch bar steel width of the beam, rivets over twelve feet, six either side of the break.
The bridges near us which are closed to vehicular traffic but not pedestrians are not in disrepair, they just do not meet current seismic requirements.
I do not like it, but I have no doubt that your estimate of how long it will take bureaucrats and engineers to futz up the repair and reopening of this bridge is either accurate or even understated. If adults were still in charge... temporary repairs would be made and the bridge would be open for business in a week. But in the current reality there is a good chance it will be in limbo for years. It is not unlike hitting a speed bump too hard with your car and one of the U-bolts holding the rear axel broke. And the mechanic decided that your car needed a complete tear down from your engine to your radio. When you object and say you just want the broken U-bolt fixed he tells you that someone's engine fell out of their car causing a fatality accident to a defenseless squirrel not long after a U-bolt failure without a complete tear down and inspection and he doesn't want to get sued.
Late as usual, damn.
I’d go 2” 4140, 4 plates and drill both sides of the beam then run the bolts all the way through, add compression and shear load to it both ways.
Then weld the edges.
Then spit on it for good measure.
The current trend with recent infrastructure failures have been neglect and incompetence. When the Oroville dam spillway failed, Gov. Brown said something along the lines that crap happens. If my memory serves me, maintenance crews patched problems as they came up and didn’t understand what was going on under the spillway. They had blocked drainage lines likely caused by trees next to the spillway. It also was built on rock that wasn’t ideal. Is the Memphis bridge a single point of failure event from wear and tear or are their other things going with the bridge?
I agree with you completely on the cause of various infrastructure failures... negelect and stupidity by government workers and their political overlords. But one break in a 60 year old span does not neccessarily indicate very much about the condition of the rest of the structure.
But I do understand your concern more intimately than most others. Before I was hired by a fire department I looked after a bunch of geriatric heavy equipment. I would fix one problem and then another would pop up. I spent hours preheating cast iron pieces, welding them up with nickel rod and fashioning some type of additional reinforcement. Most of the machinery was pre WWII even one of our old fork lifts. As far as broken pieces go they are typically found right past where there is some type of reinforcement in the assembly. This is so common that my initial reaction to the first photo was that it was a stock picture from a bridge inspection manual showing what to look for and where to look for it.
My repairs and technigues were crude compared to what professional contractors have available to them and the bridge should be able to be thoroughly inspected in days or weeks. But we are talking about a structure managed by a government agency so your assessment of the time frame that it will take is more likely much more accurate than my assessment of how long it would take to fix the problem and get things going again.
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