[libertylover]

Sad. They were actually working to improve their country.

[Wilhelm Tell]

R.I.P. Poor guys. To fall and have time enough to know what is about to happen. Construction work is really dangerous work.

[rrrod]

I’m here in Colombia now....massive road works are underway across the country. The have great roads but in the mountain areas travel is slow...too curvy to get speed up. Great for motorcycles.

[TXnMA]

"Sad. They were actually working to improve their country.

It is, indeed, sad -- but, they weren't "improving" anything (except for some politician's inflated "4G" ego)!! Their leaders were exhibiting "$#!_hole country" mentalities!

Some observations from the video (not in time-sequence order):

1. That fancy, expensive, and (obviously) risky bridge was purely for "show" and would have served no practical, transportation improvement purpose. @16-19 sec: There is a short, (~1 mile) perfectly functional road that bypasses that wide, deep chasm -- by simply going around the upper end of the short canyon, where it is narrow enough to be spanned by a short, simple, conventional bridge. If more traffic capacity was needed, paralleling the upper bridge would have doubled it (providing far more capacity than the expensive and deadly "showpiece" span).

2. The apparent failed component was the tall, vertical, (?well?) reinforced concrete pylon --- which collapsed straight down [@16-18 secs]. (Failure of cables or cable anchors would have caused the pylon to topple away from the point of failure.)

3. The pylon apparently was made of inferior concrete -- not strong enough to hold up its own weight, plus the bridge's weight. @22-24 secs, note the dark gray pulverized concrete, which is characteristic of inferior-quality concrete, which has failed in compression (reverted from solid to powder, leaving the contained rebar exposed, unmarred, and free of adhered concrete). Apparently, quality control ("slump testing" to ensure proper cement/matrix/water ratio) is not a high priority in Colombia.

That Colombia "4G Infrastructure Project" sounds almost as irrelevant, unnecessary and wasteful as a "Bullet Train Project in (broke) Californica...