Posted on 08/01/2007 4:28:27 PM PDT by ButThreeLeftsDo
Just turned on the news. 35W bridge collapsed in the Mississippi River. Cars, trucks, semis.....
Fires burning, tanker trucks, at least one school bus, more than ten cars......
Just now breaking.......
“sorry, dead weight is much different than live weight. the bridge would have been designed to hold that much dead weight. ROP and if I’m wrong...”
Sure it was. Forty years ago. I said weight plus accumulated metal fatigue and corrosion.
Thanks, I looked it up too. So they have about an hour of light left. What they call civil twilight ends at 9:14.
Not only that, they would need to know where and how to place them which isn’t as easy as it sounds. If terrorists had the means and ability to do this, they would have been able to take down a far more spectacular target.
Me too - where were you??
Lousy politics, but great health care.
OK, witness is clarifying their statement - witness is describing items in freefall as the bridge collapsed, not explosions.
“Highway 35W North was closed for resurfacing at the time and it was quite hot here today so, it’s entirely likely that those were factors and not terrorism.”
Does steel melt at 90 degrees?
This is the lady in the red car.
If you mean "explode," I'd say that's unusual (except for the fact that you have one or more fuel trucks involved here).
If you mean "lifted vertically in a sudden manner," I'd say it would not be all that unusual. It looks like one or more sections toppled instead of just collapsing, so the rotation of the slab (toppling motion) could easily lift cars, people, etc. up in the air.
I think it was decking rehab, taking the old concrete out.
Keith Olbermann is also doing an excellent job. He's a very articulate and quite an intelligent man. So sad he's politically deranged.
How do you know its from 2005??????
People are always a little excited when things like this happen.
Also, whenever there is a catastrophic failure there are lots of sounds and small events, some of which look like explosions. Remember all the people who swore they heard explosions with the World Trade? As things give, they “bang” - my guess is it is easy to confuse with an explosion.
No need to jump to conclusions here. Buildings and bridges are not new to sudden, catastrophic failure. This is just as easily an engineering problem.
I would expect that when the spans came down, the air under them had to be ‘blown out’ as the concrete spans fell...this might give the appearance of smoke etc. as the air rushed out from underneath the collapsing segments.
If I remember my physics correctly, an object will fall and accellerate at 9.8meters/sec2. So, if the bridge was 65 feet up it would take approx 2-2.5seconds to fall that distance so the speed at impact would be 100feet/second(?) so the air would have been blowing out pretty good, moving all sorts of dust and trash..
Just my really rough calcs...
Fox is mentioning WCCO now and that they (WCCO) are reporting at least one fatality.
“Who says something like that?”
I’ve done live television where you are reporting on something as it’s happening and you have to think on your feet where things are changing right before your eyes.
You’ve got a producer talking in your ear telling you to take the feed from somewhere...wrap up because a break i coming up...feeding you updated info...pluse you’ve got assistants constantly handing you script to read and you’re trying to watch the monitor.
And you’re doing ALL of this at once.
Mis-steps and mis-phrased words happen.
I’m not defending Shep here...I’m just trying to give folks who don’t know an idea of the organized chaos going on that you don’t see.
My live reporting was the Ford Funeral...tame by comparison...I’d be pulling my hair out on this one.
Someone else said that they are probably better off there than trying to get home in this mess. If they called the game they’d have a lot more people in the way and in traffic.
It may have been intentional to keep the game on.
If you look at the damage, parts of the bridge pivoted up as the center span collapsed down. That would account for the reports of debris flying up.
Channel 5’s weather guy saw that severe thunderstorms will be moving into the area of the bridge collapse within a half hour or so.
It’s awful. They said on TV that a lot of people were heading to the Twins game around that time.
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