Posted on 10/25/2015 12:01:20 PM PDT by Leaning Right
New documents raise questions about the integrity of the steel rods that hold together the Bay Bridge eastern span and point to potentially widespread problems that experts warn could lead to premature failure.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
The answer to that question is that the rods were not manufactured in America. They were manufactured in China. Here's a link to a 2011 NY Times article that discusses the China angle in detail:
From that article: “They’ve produced a pretty impressive bridge for us,” Tony Anziano, a program manager at the California Department of Transportation, said.
I thought San Fran was the land of rods.
I knew this was coming. Putting high-strength steel susceptible to hydrogen embrittlement near saltwater and hoping to prevent water infiltration with seals is about a stupid design as you could imagine. Any first year materials student knows that. Now what? Tear down the $10 billion bridge and start over? Too bad they are just about done demolishing the old span.
This will go down as the biggest civil engineering failure in US history.
Well rod riders anyway!
Pop goes the span rods, Chinese weasels and foolish Liberals who ordered them.
But the people who bought the steel got a good deal!!! /s
I’ve been to that area. If that bridge fails, that would definitely impact the traffic in and around the Bay Area. Expect a lot more traffic jams.
Oops.
The Materials Engineering and Testing Services branch of Caltrans admitted in a report to bridge officials in April that no one checked the bridge rods’ quality during production at Vulcan Threaded Products in Alabama or after they were shipped to California in 2007.
And if it's the former, I wonder who did the actual design work. Could it have been the Chinese, or were they just executing plans drawn up by California engineers?
Either way, I guess it doesn't really matter to California. Gov. Brown will probably just issue another billion dollars in bonds, and try again.
“It looks like we didn’t do the quality assurance we were supposed to do,” Maroney said. "Heh, heh. Oopsie. Oh well. At this point, what difference does it make?"
[I made the last part of Maroey's quote up, but it seems to be in the spirit of this disaster.]
This is so typical of government. If you lose track of ONE welding rod while constructing a nuclear power plan, the feds will nearly send you to jail. But if you skip entire critical materials inspections on a government bridge, it's just "Oopsie. We'll do better next time. Promise."
Moonbeam Brown...”Let’s see now. The choo-choo was budgeted at $68B and is way over budget, probably headed to $400B. We need another $10B to build a new Oakland-TI span. Aw, what the heck. We’ll borrow $410B. Nobody will notice another measly $10B.”
So now that “they know” what’s the plan - shut it down and do it right or wait for the thing to collapse while people are on it? Best I can tell these are the only 2 choices.
Private cars are wasteful, anyway. Instead of driving, folks should lower their carbon footprint. How, you ask? Why magic, of course.
It’s a combination of bad design, poor materials selection, and poor QC. Enough blame to go around for decades. The funny thing is the commission spent the better part of decade reviewing design concepts, picking one, and getting contracts issued. And they STILL couldn’t get it right.
Since they know there is a problem, then fix it. It does no good complaining about it.
But the “conservative” free traders tell is it doesn’t matter whether our bridges are made here or in China. What matters is that they are cheap, and global corporations make profits.
Government=FUBAR
California was dumb when they didn’t do the train 20 years ago. You wait and wait and it gets increasingly more expensive. We have idiots in California. The only good news is California has improved their financial situation a million times the last few years which is good for the country.
I was just about to question if it was a design problem rather than a materials problem.
As for the biggest civil engineering failure, there’s some stiff company in that category.
The levees broken by Katrina courtesy of the Army Corps of Engineers.
Boston’s Big Dig with an initial price tag of 2.4 billion with a cost that eventually exceeded 12 billion that wound up killing a poor woman because concrete ceiling tiles fell on her car. (to me, tiles weigh maybe a couple of pounds and are not big enough to crush a car. Nor are they held in place with epoxy and bolts)
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