Come on! A little crazy glue, some elbow grease, good as new!
Seriously, though, it does appear that you could replace the gusset plates with longer ones, grabbing the intact portion of the beam, assuming you could winch it back into place. Something like this happened about ten years ago in Boston when a (Canadian) truck hit a vertical beam on a major traffic artery. They actually managed to save the bridge and it’s held up all these years. You would probably need thicker gusset plates, and on both sides, but it would be a lot cheaper and faster than a new bridge.
Order the gusset plates on Tuesday, put out a request for repair bids on Monday.
This is why amatuers shouldn’t comment on such. What’s really needed here is some duct tape!
I have a dumb question.
Whatever the cause of the failure, how do the engineers determine if the bridge’s other components are in the same “ready to snap” same condition?
From the picture, they have a big problem. That’s not due to weather. That excuse is brown and sticky due to where it was pulled out of. They have to determine why it failed before they can reopen the bridge. The findings may show a far greater problem in many areas. Fatigue, inadequate design, inferior steel (Chinese?) or some other cause needs to be determined first.