Bridge Falls into Mississippi River

The entire span of a four-lane interstate bridge over the Mississippi River collapsed during evening rush hour Wednesday, sending vehicles, tons of concrete and twisted metal crashing into the water.

The Interstate 35W bridge, which spans between Minneapolis and St. Paul, was under construction when it broke into several huge sections. Dozens of vehicles were scattered and stacked on top of each other amid the rumble.

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The Homeland Security Department had received no indications Wednesday night that the collapse was related to an act of terrorism, department spokesman Russ Knocke said in Washington.

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I don't get it. 35W was under construction yet there were vehicles on it? Does that mean those were all construction vehicles? CNN reported 50 cars plunged into the river.

US and west will have a lot of problems down in the road. The most infrastructure in these countries were built in 1950s-1970s, and reach the time of heavy maintenance/rebuilt.

The problem is, you don't have enough cement and steel production output. US cement production is only a few percentage of China's(1 billion ton/year) and steel a fraction of Chinese as well. The collapsed california bridge has to wait for imported Chinese steel coming to start repair. And the environmentists block all the new factories for steel and cement, this means big problems in the future.

The bridge was 40 years old and under repair not construction.

Bridges all over the world collapse frequently. If you read enough news to notice. Interesting thing that I notice that I see more stories about bridges collapsing in China in Western news more. Feels like a shot commenting at the quality of construction in general in China. They say this bridge, although 50 years old, is considered a young bridge. Fact is many bridges in the US are 100 years old. I live in the SF Bay Area. The 1989 quake where the Oakland freeway collapsed caused the majority of deaths during that event. If there were no Bay Bridge World Series that day, the death toll would've been tremendous on any normal day.

Well, depending on the material used, for a concrete construction (cement + steel), 40 years is quite old, definitely it needs maintenance/repair. Concrete(cement) will decay with the time quite fast.

For a stone construction, 40 years is quite young. Look at all old churches, the oldest ones are of stone built.

The foundation of the modern civilization is very vulnerable, costs a lot to maintain it.

Well how many concrete-technic courses have you lads being studying? Or how many bridgebuilding courses? Leave the civil engineering to those who actually knows about it.

As 3rd year student of civil enginering, Even I have no nerve to make any assumptions based on nothing more than speculations of stuff that really doesen't make a difference. Yeas you need cement and steel to concretebuilding, so what? You need nails and wood for timberwork.
As you guys open the issue, why not elaborate on the requirements of the concrete-tensity, stiffness and mixture of what is used as a standart in US bridges now and back then when that particular bridge was build? And give some sort of deeper analyze in the light of the exact information of that bridge's concrete, building method and other sturctual desigs of what might casued the proplem. Some nice cut-ways would be fine add...

...Or if you have no idea of bridgebuilding even in theory, why not just concerate to paying respect to the ones that lost their lives, ok?

I've done some studies in the old architecture comparing(China, Europe, Egypt...), archaeology, etc

Very interesting topic, indeed

Gollevainen said:

Well how many concrete-technic courses have you lads being studying? Or how many bridgebuilding courses? Leave the civil engineering to those who actually knows about it.

As 3rd year student of civil enginering, Even I have no nerve to make any assumptions based on nothing more than speculations of stuff that really doesen't make a difference. Yeas you need cement and steel to concretebuilding, so what? You need nails and wood for timberwork.
As you guys open the issue, why not elaborate on the requirements of the concrete-tensity, stiffness and mixture of what is used as a standart in US bridges now and back then when that particular bridge was build? And give some sort of deeper analyze in the light of the exact information of that bridge's concrete, building method and other sturctual desigs of what might casued the proplem. Some nice cut-ways would be fine add...

...Or if you have no idea of bridgebuilding even in theory, why not just concerate to paying respect to the ones that lost their lives, ok?

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Where were you reading that we're disprespecting the lives lost? Obviously the bridge wasn't being maintained appropriately. Is that something offensive to say? I'm watching the cable news channels right now and that's all they're talking about.

Well, I just follow the lead of CNN, and this is not something I made up:

"I think we should look at this tragedy that occurred as a wake-up call for us. We have -- all over the country -- crumbling infrastructure, highways, bridges, dams, and we really need to take a hard look at this," Reid said Thursday.

I've traveled in many states of America, and see many things, especially I like to look at things from engineering point of view.

My point was that concrete building, exspecially when it comes to the stiffness and material strenght calculations of the cememt is a real sciense and has some much things to be taken under consideration other than steel and cement. Bridgebuilding in general is one of the toughest and hardest task in civil engineering so really before we can assume anything, we need alot more data other than some news channels own speculations. Lets just wait for the official report from the accident and then we determn what caused the catastrophe.
There's no such thing as "obvioussly the bridge wasen't maintained properly". In concretebuilding the seed of destruction may have happened right in the moment of the when they molded the bridge. Maintainance wouldn't help in those situations nor would lack of it make a bridge build properly from working mixture fall like that. But like I've pointed out its pointless to make assumptions before we know something more valid. So if anyone have new real information of the accident please share it with us.


Some of you where acting like they actually knew something about it (but revealed their apparent ignorance by listing obviousness) and make assumptions in the manner that could have had led to the usual "my country makes better steel than yours" type of "discussion". So you know me...I wont let that happen without a notice