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.......
can you please repost the link or direct me to it? THANKS!
Lt. Gov. Mulnau, who also heads MDOT.
Emergency inspection to be done on several in MN with the same design.
OK, thanks.
Er, LeSabre - right picture, somehow typed the wrong name. It’s a 00-05 LeSabre, not a Jaguar.
(I’m a huge Jaguar fan and have two at the moment, one XJ6 VDP and one XKR)
Maybe it's the way she drives...LOL!
I finally got an email, and all is well. My son does not live in the news media world. They probably just watched a movie and went to bed in peace.
I have watched the video a number of times.
I observe that the end of the bridge which mates up to land (or a low-mounted support near land) is the first to fall.
That actual junction is not visible in the frame – it is off camera to the right.
But you can see from the displacement of the bridge that the breakage occurs first at or near the point of joining to the land. That to me seems ridiculous.
The main truss is unaffected throughout most of the span, but then shears at the point of main support, about half way across the river. This is due tothe fact that the span has, at that point, already dropped straight down due to loss of support on the land end. The subsequent breakages all make sense, but the first one doesn’t.
MnDOT says this thing was OK in 2006. Minnesota has a major culture of proper maintenance because of the winter snows and deicing.
The very fast, immediate failure of the bridge at the point mating to land is, to me suspicious. The loss of the support on the land mating side seems to beinstantaneous across the entire support. This didn’t lose 1 girder on one side or a domino effect of girders. They seemed to all go at once.
Also supporting that observation is a complete lack of torque. This bridge falls straight down. There is no twisting motion. Both sides of that bridge were released simultaneously. After the first breach, then sections
across the bridge go one after another, which follows rationally.
My read is a very fast and simultaneous breaking of the support at the land mating point.
I find it, then, insulting to the intelligence that we are instantly told by the police chief and Washinton “it wasn’t terrorism, it wasn’t terrorism, it wasn’t terrorism.”
No, it’s the S-Type. None of the post-Ford-takeover-designed cars have been very good. The S-Type wasn’t all that great, the X-Type is horrible (for the price, image, and badge, it’d be perfectly fine as a Mercury), and the 04-up XJ and 07-up XK just don’t capture the essence of the brand. None of them are selling well.
That's repeated after ever bridge collapse that's been mentioned and I looked at on these threads.
Nothing comes out in the wash, but sometimes you can exhume something rotten from the burial ground of the Covered-up.
Nice house:’)
The fallacy is that if we spent less money on X we would have spent more money on Y, and if we spent more money on Y it would have prevented a disaster.
Lets use an example. El Spendthrift and his wife buy a big screen TV for the home for $4,000. El Spendthrift and his wife also have a roof that is near the end of its useful life. The roof leaks and destroys the big screen TV.
For us to say that the spending of the money on the big screen TV cause them not to fix the roof is a logical fallacy.
Not mine. :-P I will never own a Buick. :-P
A horrific event. I saw some of the released video, what is the length of the collapse time, curious if that is included.
A theory floated last night by a weather guy was that an dam 200 yards upstream may have over time created enough of a disturbance of and removal of sediment and bedrock.
btw, I have not seen or reviewed a detailed map of that area so I am not sure where and how many and even if there are supports that could have been undermined in any way.
It also sounds like they had some lanes closed and slow moving bumper to bumper traffic that may have caused more load to be present , a ‘perfect storm’ of things if you will.
Obviously, there have been other failures and investigators will now need to compare those and this event to better determine what caused what we witnessed happen.
In just 66K miles you cannot believe the items she’s had replaced...thank God she bought the extended warranty.
For this to be terrorism, someone would have needed to have the material to blow the joints, as well as the knowledge of where to place them and a means to detonate them. They would have needed to place these charges on a well traveled bridge, while bridge work was going on. Then they would have needed to hope that the workers didn’t detect anything or accidently knock the charges loose. And even then, there would have been absolutely no way to be certain that the entire bridge would blow and cause widespread death.
For the same amount of effort, a terrorist with the ability to do this could have placed charges in an office building parking garage at night. Had a much lower chance of detection, been able to insure that the entire building collapsed and kill hundreds of people.
So, why would a terrorist go to so much effort to plan a very sophisticated attack which, while tragic for those who died, would be considered fairly minor?
Rewatch the video and tell me where the explosion was. Where was the smoke? Where were the reports of odor from the explosives? Why did everything go down and nothing blast out? The reality is, that a terrorist who was sophisticated enough to do this could have done more damage than any of us want to think about.
Actually, I can. Ford built the S-Type down to a price, and it shows.
The most famous malfunction of the S-Type is that some cars, when parked in the middle of a thunderstorm, will roll down all the windows and open the sunroof for no apparent reason.
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