Makes sense, considering that more than half of the bridge still stands, so it's not really a construction problem. Anyway, do we have casualty reports?
China News Thread
- Thread starter KYli
- Start date
The headline of that news.cn piece says "No Casualties". Cracks were spotted on Nov 10. Traffic through the bridge was cut off on the same day.
Hongqi Bridge in Sichuan, on G317.
Yup. As predicted first thing Reddit did. Its getting pretty easy to predict them.
Let's speculate here.
So, cracks appeared 2 days ago before the landslide. Do you think the cracks were related to the landslide? Or is it just poor build quality, which I partially disagree with?
manqiangrexue
Brigadier
Probably accumulated pressure from shifting substrate leading up to the landslide that exceeded the predicted parameters of operation caused the cracks. It kept increasing as more substrate shifted until the threshold for landslide but by that time, the cracks warned the people in charge that disaster was impending. They probably didn't know that shifting soil weight caused the cracks until the landslide occurred; when they shut the bridge down, they likely didn't know if it was structural failure due to construction error/miscalculation or other forces. The landslide validated that it was the latter.
If the bridge didn't develop cracks before a landslide wiped it out, then we could have a real disaster in loss of human life on our hands.
The cracks that appear earlier were probably not in the bridge structure, but on approach road leading to the bridge. Prior to the massive slide, there must have some movement of underlying earth and rock layer which lead to cracks and fissures on earth surface. I assume that there has been engineering geological studies being conducted, and perhaps it was inadequate in scope, or someone failed to identify the problem/risk involved.
