Later when I watched a safety expert saying that the river was too rapid for him to send in his divers, I came to the conclusion that what brought the structure down was water erosion and "Cavitation".
I will take bets that during any previous inspections of this bridge nobody thought to send down divers to inspect the bases of these verticle legs.
This showed me that the collapse wasn’t due to fatigue cracks in the super-structure but failure in the piles on which the roadway was laid.
I wonder if the damn above the bridge was built before or after the bridge was built?..... There’s a picture of the bridge at the link below and further down the page is another picture showing the bridge intact and the damn above it [#167}. From that picture you can easily seen the strong current flow indications.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1874950/posts?page=101#101
The pilings were noted to be undercut in 1979.
Yeah, the bridge collapsed, some Americans got killed, but don’t you feel good. We’ve got trillions for Iraq to rebuild the whole damn place because their too lazy. Jorge wants $300 million for Pakistan rebuilding, foreign aid to Mexico because they need our money, all the liberals want us in Darfur, we’re sending an American hospital ship to South America for a year - free medical for them, and people wonder why we can’t rebuild our infrastructure and complete a southern border fence.