Posted on 08/24/2012 4:43:14 PM PDT by smokingfrog
A eight-lane suspension bridge collapsed in Harbin, northeast China’s Heilongjiang province on August 24, 2012. Three people were killed and five injured when an eight-lane suspension bridge in northeast China collapsed early on August 24, only nine months after it opened, state media said.
(Excerpt) Read more at photos.pasadenastarnews.com ...
Made in China....
: )
“Made in China” stamped on the side.
Courtney Campbell Causeway in Tampa was built by a crook who used salt water while mixing the contrete for the bridges.
Insted of a 60 or 100 year bridge it had to be replaced in twenty.
Course the money he saved made him rich then he filed for bankruptsy and walked away for ever to live large.
Such is the same the world over, poor materials or poor work.
OMG, and they are building bridges in California????
Under 0bama he would be transferred to a foreign post to avoid testifying before Congress.
Guess who made the bridge sections for repairing the Bay Bridge in the SF Bay Area?
makes a person wonder if the Three Gorges Dam would suffer a catastrophic action of events, what would the amount of deaths be, over a hundred million?
From the looks of the pictures, there was to much weight on that bridge from the trucks.
It’s only a guess but I think the cause is right there in your picture. That semi-trailer appears to be filled with gravel. If so it might be close to 50 tons. Add that to a bridge support made with inferior concrete and rebar and you might find a support catastrophically failing.
Yes
Anyone who even suggests that China is kicking our butt concerning infrastructure is insane!
It looks like those two trucks hauling gravel might have been overweight for this stretch of road.
Somebody in Pasedena should have consulted an engineer before writing or at least proof read it before publishing it. Those pictures are not of a suspension bridge. As an example, the Golden Gate Bridge is a suspension bridge. This was just an elevated highway.
Others noted that maybe the trucks were too heavy for the roadway. Could be, but as the supports are not as wide as the roadway, I would say that the failure was all of the weight of those trucks were all on one side causing it to fall to that one side, or/and a failure over time and especially suspicious of not doing the proper crush tests of the concrete used.
The road is intact
My theory is the columns eroded evenly from water?
Looks like red truck is hauling bags of rice, not gravel.
Now I see the second truck hauling gravel just in front of the black truck.
They don’t need to beat us. They only need to beat India.
The columns are intact, the caps broke away ... oddly a number of them gave way at the same time.
Faulty concrete used in constructing too large a span of unstressed caps.
My theory
Good point, I’ve seen other pictures from China that show that exact thing happening.
I’ve also seen, (in Person), where a concrete support had too much sand and not enough heavy aggregate or the proper proportion of cement literally shatter when the load it was bearing exceeded it’s capacity.
Made with high quality Chinese steel.
yep
“Anyone who even suggests that China is kicking our butt concerning infrastructure is insane!”
You forgot to mention the 20,000 miles of freeway lanes they built just last year - meanwhile we build “bike-lanes”, “bridges to nowhere”, and “trains to nowhere”.
If they were adding extra shovels of sand to the cement or cutting back on bolts to save money, you are darn right they will be executed.
We could use a dose of the Chinese cure for corruption in the U.S.
“I’ve also seen, (in Person), where a concrete support had too much sand and not enough heavy aggregate or the proper proportion of cement literally shatter when the load it was bearing exceeded it’s capacity.”
They’ll just hire the former president of Loral, Bernard Schwartz, to tell them EXACTLY how to formulate re-inforced concrete, just as he taught them rocket staging for their ICBMs.
There’s no shortage of American traitors willing to make sure we get defeated.
lurk;mazada77
I agree with all of you. Here’s another thought: “Where the hell is the rebar?!” You can see only a few rebar in any of the pics.
See Post #27.
you beat me to it
see #27
Rustification is the term I learned to describe channels that are formed in the concrete (we used triangular strips of wood) to direct water and prevent weak spots from being used too much by water.
Maybe whatever way was used to attach the downspout was a weakening moment ... a drilled hole ?
That's WORSE than non stressed.
The bridge was not that old, so corrosion probably not an issue. I think Mazda77 is right. The part that sticks-out beyond the column is just to thin and weak. (Looks nice though.) It breaks off and the whole thing tips over. Trucks might be restricted to the right lane where the bridge is the weakest.
I think a lot of analysis here is correct (with what we have to go on)
The pictures are very telling.
"At issue is the integrity of the central tower's concrete foundation. On Monday state senate transportation leaders called for a seismic review. The Federal Highway Administration is conducting a review, and in a preliminary report the feds criticized Cal Trans for knowing four years ago that an inspector was doctoring data but failed to take action."
If any part of the six-plus-billion-dollar bridge goes the whole thing falls. That's what some experts say about the unique design.. but boy is it beautiful and fits right in with San Francisco and Oakland. And much of the six-plus billion dollars went to China (probably with a few million circulating back to a certain Senatorette whose husband has umpteen business ventures in Red China). Oh.. and that concrete and steel meets Red China standards.
If you are driving I-80 into San Francisco you can go around a couple of ways and not have to put your life in danger. Hey! Some say that a quake anything near the magnitude of Loma Prieta and it will be gone.
We need pictures from the underside of the flopped roadway to determine if it was the outside of the horizontal or vertical support but then again it could also be what came first, the chicken or the egg.
I would tend to say it is where the vertical meets the horizontal because in theory the greatest moment is at that point and the one on the other side with a close second on the inner intersections of the vertical column. Add the cantilevered forces of the truck weights to the outside.
Is it me or does it look like there is a ripped fabric material exposed in the upper left corner of the picture where the roadway separated?
Rep. Hank Johnson from GA was right - too much weight WILL make THINGS tip over!!!
Why is this called a suspension bridge? My idea of a suspension bridge is the Golden Gate and the Bay Bridge..
What photo number shows the fabric? I’d like to take a look.
(I’ve looked at them all -—— The only fact I see is no
rebar.)
Slump test is only to determine water content, test cylinders
are made to be broken at certain dates after they are made
to determine strength.
HARBOR FREIGHT Store bridge
OK .. I misunderstood .. thanx
Upper left of post 28. Looking closer, it seems to be stucco mesh. Seeing this makes it no wonder the Olympics venues of 2008 are already falling apart.
Don't know why it's called a suspension bridge except ignorance. It's an elevated roadway.
I looked at that 6-8” square piece, a poor picture, BUT it sure would lead one to think of stucco mesh. Earlier posts spoke of the poor quality of concrete. The pic at #28 sure shows no large aggregate all sand to 3/4”- size -— Nice.
In China they call these “Tofu Construction Projects”
the sad thing is, the Chinese just accept it as the way life and Governments are. They haven’t known anything else.
They have an all-controlling, all-corrupt, elitist, central-planning Gov’t, where apparatchiks and cronies skim the cream off the economy.
I see the USA heading towards an American version of the same thing.
That’s not a suspension bridge. Looks like a rigid and overextended cantilever.
Must of sent the engineers to Texas A&M.
“Must of sent the engineers to Texas A&M.”
I am laughing, but why Texas A&M? I am an engineer, chemical, not civil, and I went to one of the best schools. But why are you picking on the Texas Aggies?
Now, as far as the grammar goes, it should say ‘Must have...’
:)
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