[george76]

Bent gusset plates on the Interstate 35 W bridge are seen ( center) in this 2003 photo released by the National Transportation Safety Board.old photos of the Interstate 35W bridge show two gusset plates were visibly bent as early as 2003 — four years before the span collapsed into the Mississippi River, killing 13 people.

Photos released this month by the National Transportation Safety Board show the plates that hold beams together at two separate connecting points are slightly bent.

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[Post Toasties]

Whole lotta stupidity going on in this Socialist Paradise.

[coloradan]

Mods, if you can't link to an AP photo here, please pull my post.

[Mad_Tom_Rackham]

Are not government “bridge inspectors” responsible for disclosing this?

[Incorrigible]

One article even noted that there was 191 tons of construction material piled on the weakest point of the bridge at the time of the collapse.

[the invisib1e hand]

what am I missing?

[ikka]

But at least they got their light rail project funded!

[SpaceBar]

Comments on an older related thread suggest that adding four additional lanes of traffic in 1988 may have contributed to the bridge’s failure.

[Old Sarge]

And it was what, not four minutes before somebody said “Bush’s Fault!’ in the MSM...

[river rat]

The first thing that came to my mind - is the engineer who designed the plates, must have believed that the number of rivets were more important than the THICKNESS and STRENGTH of the materials being riveted together..

In such a critical application - I’m shocked at the thinness of the plates used to secure the beam members...

I would want to see a plate at least 3 times the thickness used — if FIXING the members and prevent movement was the design objective...

Hell — it looks like they used a too thin plate and popped a few hundred rivets into it thinking the rivets would increase the the strength of the UNRIVETED expanses of the sheet.

What they accomplished was securely fastening a thin member between two shifting beams, and over time the FLEXING fractured the sheet, leading to a catastrophic failure and the whole assembly collapsed.

I’m surprised this design was ever proposed or approved by any Civil Engineer.....

[Moonman62]

After all this information, it’s amazing the bridge lasted as long as it did.

[Bean Counter]

Has this bent gussett plate the site of the initial failure in the collapse?

[RayChuang88]

I said shortly after the bridge collapsed that if you've seen pictures of the bridge, it was essentially a disaster waiting to happen. Between the spindly and EXPOSED steel structure that was subject to the temperature and moisture extremes of the Minneapolis, MN area and the whole bridge being held up at four small points on a thin concrete piling, I'm surprised the bridge didn't collage years earlier.

[norge]

Cripe, and I used to be scared walking over the old Washington Avenue bridge, back in the ‘40’s. I just knew it was going to come down.

[mewzilla]

Meanwhile...

St. Cloud rerouting traffic after bridge closed

Inspectors found bowing gusset plates.

[jaydubya2]

"The two photos are believed to have been taken by URS Inc., a San Francisco consulting firm the state hired to examine the bridge from 2003 to 2007. "URS and the state have both got a lot of explaining to do as far as why (the bending) was not observed, and if it was observed, why that was not immediately investigated," James Schwebel, an attorney representing a group of victims, told the AP on Sunday. "How could it possibly have been missed?"

In the photo, something is taped to the beams in serveral locations, could they be stress/load sensors of some sort?

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