SouthEastCashew:
toonsy:
SouthEastCashew:
Wasn’t that tanker explosion the other day in Genoa as well■■?Bologna
Ah close enough then lol
Right country at least 
toonsy:
SouthEastCashew:
toonsy:
SouthEastCashew:
Wasn’t that tanker explosion the other day in Genoa as well■■?Bologna
Ah close enough then lol
Right country at least [emoji38]
Lol yeah! What I was getting at though was terrorism maybe?.. Seems strange how within a week two incidents have happened on bridges in Italy…
truckman020:
newmercman:
Now I know SFA about the physics and forces on a bridge, but to my untrained eye that last picture looks as if the two sections don’t line up straight.I’ve been on those bridges around Genoa and along the coast road many times, pretty spectacular pieces of engineering considering they were built 50yrs or more years ago.
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just going to say that myself,well out of sync,in another it looks like it’s twisted over the river section,ref the first part you said,looking at it if you followed it with your vision the left side would meet with the middle.
There’s a lot of missing bridge between the two points which would probably account for the illusion that it was out of alignment when the relevant reference would have been the alignment over its full length and where all the missing length of the bridge met in the middle.Bearing in mind that there would have been no way of joining it all if that’s an accurate representation of its alignment.They wouldn’t have just been able to push/pull the deck sideways a bit to join it if it was that far out.Bearing in mind Italian weights the bridge has probably been subjected to massive amounts of fatigue over all those years.Which leaves the question what was its actual design life and how much stress redundancy was built into it.
Loads of them bridges on that genoa road seeing as they was all built about same time i guess other bridges are dangerous aswell
looks like it was all in gods hands with flash hiting pillar…
Having just missed that Swiss mud slide last week by a mile I feel lucky as I was going to go down to monterroso el le mare 
Dan, FFS don’t come back through the tunnel!
albion:
Dan, FFS don’t come back through the tunnel!
Iam back thanks 
I drove through Genoa last month, along with a few other people I know
What a ■■■■■ thing to happen to anyone and my sympathies go out to all
RIP to the fallen
it will be out of allignment due to the reinforcement giving way with out that any structure is just floating in the wind mafiosa concrete remember
removed - poor taste under the circumstances.
BBC R4 Today programme had interview with engineer about 07hr15-ish. Sorry no link.
Clear and informative, without loads of wild speculation.
As an aside now many have used the AutoStradi in Sicily? Large sections of it are raised above flat, dry, land on concrete pillars. Why?
Follow the money, who runs (ran?) the concrete plants…
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Concrete in New York is known as Italian Gold, but this is in Italy and everything there is corrupt, everything.
As Carryfast said, 50 plus years of heavily loaded vehicles is going to put a great deal of wear and tear on the structure, add the salty sea air and the chemicals used to prevent icing and it’s clear that this bridge had a hard life, dodgy concrete or not.
It could just be a terrible tragedy, a combination of factors that in isolation wouldn’t have resulted in such a catastrophic failure, yet combined they did.
Hopefully they’re doing a complete assessment of the structural integrity of all similarly constructed bridges.
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good_friend:
I drove through Genoa last month, along with a few other people I knowWhat a [zb] thing to happen to anyone and my sympathies go out to all
RIP to the fallen
Omg it could have been you. Makes you think. We are all so lucky it wasn’t you
SuperMultiBlue:
good_friend:
I drove through Genoa last month, along with a few other people I knowWhat a [zb] thing to happen to anyone and my sympathies go out to all
RIP to the fallen
Omg it could have been you. Makes you think. We are all so lucky it wasn’t you
If you’ve driven over it, as many people have pointed out they have, it does make you think. One of my first thoughts was thank f it’s August and my first instinct isn’t to see if one of mine is out there. It’s human nature.
albion:
SuperMultiBlue:
good_friend:
I drove through Genoa last month, along with a few other people I knowWhat a [zb] thing to happen to anyone and my sympathies go out to all
RIP to the fallen
Omg it could have been you. Makes you think. We are all so lucky it wasn’t you
If you’ve driven over it, as many people have pointed out they have, it does make you think. One of my first thoughts was thank f it’s August and my first instinct isn’t to see if one of mine is out there. It’s human nature.
All true. We all react as humans to a tragic event. We may try to step outside ourselves and see things objectively but we remain human.
At least those of us with human, not troll blood in our veins.
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Makes me think going back many years, of the Tinsley viaduct at Sheffield which apparently had some problems. The hard shoulders were closed for a very long time (maybe years? Maybe still?) on the upper sections and they seemed to me to ‘droop’ a bit from the rest of the road.
No comfort to take the lower section, drop or be dropped on, what a choice. 
As one who has taken 40 tons over this very structure.
Life is fragile, your day to day problems just took a reality check.
Most wont even notice.
AFIK the Tinsley viaduct lane closures were due to the increases in permitted lorry weights in the late 70s from 32 tons (32.5 tonnes) on 4 axles, to 38/40 tonnes on 5 axles (depending on configuration) and, later, to 44 tonnes on 6 axles.
Many other bridges were partially closed, some of them for years, for the same reason. The A40 roundabout over the M5 took a decade to strengthen.
manski:
Some good background info on the BBC site including this from a UK engineer :-" A ‘very unusual design’
Ian Firth, a structural engineer and specialist in bridges, said the Morandi bridge is of a “very unusual design”.“It is too early to say what caused the tragic collapse, but as this reinforced and pre-stressed concrete bridge has been there for 50 years, it is possible that corrosion of tendons or reinforcement may be a contributory factor," the former president of the Institution of Structural Engineers said.
He said the storm taking place at the time and the ongoing work on the foundations may or may not be relevant - we simply do not know yet."
Rest of it here :-
bbc.com/news/live/world-europe-45182675
.While I am no engineer, I’m old enough to remember a series of collapses of school swimming pool roofs in the 1970s. They were all large, clear spans, and all constructed from pre stressed concrete. Thankfully , I don’t remember there being any casualties as all the failures took place when the pools were out of use.
Naturally, there was a major inquiry into the cause of the failures. It was established that the concrete manufacturers had used cement with a very high alumina content in order to cause the concrete to set more quickly and therefore to permit higher productivity at a time of very high demand for their products. In a very dry environment, this would have probably been safe enough, but anywhere that the concrete beams were in damp positions and liable to be even slightly penetrated by water, the reaction between the high carbon steel cables and the alumina in the cement caused the steel to oxidise quickly and excessively. ( we’ve all seen the reaction when aluminium and steel components are put together)
This expansion of the cables caused the concrete to split away and the structure immediately lost its integrity, with predictable results.
It may have no bearing whatsoever on the Italian tragedy, but it is accepted that all prestressed beams from this era are very suspect.
The UK still has many buildings containing this material, and I know of at least one company of specialists which seeks out and monitors their condition. Happily, I don’t believe there has been a failure for many years.