Posted on 11/22/2008 8:06:44 PM PST by ButThreeLeftsDo
It's official. The Interstate 35W bridge fell -- not because of what Tim Pawlenty or Carol Molnau did or didn't do -- but because engineers failed to calculate correctly the thickness of gusset plates more than 40 years ago.
The National Transportation Safety Board's findings, released on Nov. 14, must feel like some vindication to Pawlenty, Molnau and MnDOT's bridge inspection and maintenance team.
After the collapse, Pawlenty counseled patience. He urged Minnesotans to wait for a thorough investigation before leaping to conclusions about why the bridge fell.
Instead, critics launched a relentless -- if often subtly expressed -- search for villains to blame for what we now know was a tragic accident.
Sometimes bluntly, sometimes not, critics suggested that Pawlenty's skinflint tax policies and budgets had set the stage for the I-35W bridge tragedy. The governor's opponents maintained that he had sacrificed bridge maintenance and safety -- and thus the well-being of Minnesotans -- in an attempt to adhere to his no new taxes pledge.
(Excerpt) Read more at startribune.com ...
Sure....
What, you mean it wasn’t Bush’s fault?
Strange as it may seem.......
A bridge last for 40 years...and it was designed wrong? Makes you think that is NOT the answer.
I keep telling everyone on here it was Keith Ellison’s fault. 35 minutes after he announced he was going to discuss a peace agreement that was not for Israel, the bridge fell.
Read the reports....
It wasn’t Tim nor “W’s” fault.....
It was a total of three minutes and forty seconds before CNN-O blamed it on President Bush.
You design things with margin. When the margin is lower than expected things can fail unexpectedly even after a long time. Clearly the bridge failed. Assuming it was maintained and the soil didn’t fail that leaves the bridge itself as the source of the failure.
Fatigue can make the difference.
Followed directly by Jim Oberstar (DFL MN) who has been in charge of the Tranportation Committee for about as long as the bridge existed.....and he said nothing about it until it crashed.
I got all interested in this in the aftermath, and studied the reports available on the internet, and I feel they have completely bypassed the maintenance issue. As I pointed out earlier, the FATIGUE EVALUATION AND REDUNDANCY ANALYSIS for Bridge No. 9340, I-35W over Mississippi River, July 2006, cites important maintenance problems, which it unaccountably ( to me ) dismisses lightly. I refer to the roller bearings at the base of the columns, which are major design elements of the bridge. The report states there was “dirt packed into various areas of the bearing.” and “All the roller bearings seem to have thick coatings of paint and did not appear to be functioning as intended under live load.” This last phrase was a euphemism, admitting only that the bearings could not adjust from moment to moment, when in fact they were “frozen” for months, and possibly years. Under extreme thermal stress, they could give way and cause the entire bridge structure to “spring”.
Incredibly ( in hindsight as it may be ) this analysis accounts only for the static conditions, admitting “the actual force-displacement relationship of the bearings is nearly impossible to charactize.” So, “In the computer modeling, two extreme bearing bearing conditions were investigated for their impact: 1) the ‘as-designed’ condition based on the plans; and 2) the fully ‘locked’ condition.”
This ‘locked’ conditon refers to the bearings “frozen” by rust, dirt, and paint. But what if the rust, dirt, and paint should suddenly give way ?
I personally believe that this is exactly what happened.
This bridge failed because Bush spent money on Iraq instead of this bridge.
Don’t you watch or read the NEWS?
It is sad when people die in accidents. Libtards compound this by pointing fingers at Conservatives whenever they get the chance. I wonder what they would do if there were no Conservatives around to blame?
same as Katrina, the levees were inadequate from the time they were designed, but the media wanted to hang Bush.
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