Free Republic

HOUSTON — Harris County Commissioners voted unanimously Tuesday night to change the engineer of record on the Sam Houston Tollway Ship Channel Bridge after a review found one portion that had not yet been built contained a potential design flaw. The Harris County Toll Road Authority hired an independent consultant, COWI North America, Inc., to review the design of the bridge. HCTRA deputy director John Tyler told KHOU 11 in January that COWI found the possible weakness in December 2019. The design comes from FIGG Bridge Engineers, Inc., the same company behind a Florida pedestrian bridge that collapsed in 2018,...

HOUSTON – Following 20 months of construction of the new Ship Channel Bridge along the Beltway 8, the county has issued a pause. Harris County Commissioner Adrian Garcia said the decision was made following the discovery of a design flaw with part of the bridge. “I want to make sure that we are doing everything on behalf of public safety to ensure that everything is well,” Garcia said. “This was obviously concerning and alarming for me." John Tyler, the deputy director of engineering with the Harris County Toll Road Authority and in charge of the project, said the flaw was...

A new Cline Avenue Bridge is rising in East Chicago, with more than a third of 29 piers in place that will carry traffic 100 feet above the Indiana Harbor Ship Canal, and with the casting of surface segments well underway in a building erected for that purpose at the bridge's Riley Road headquarters. The privately owned toll-bridge is scheduled to open to traffic in January 2020. "The project is moving along — it's on schedule," said Terry Velligan, the bridge's general manager of operations, on Tuesday. Normally 168 workers are on-site each day, he said. Velligan works for United...

The National Transportation Safety Board’s preliminary report on the fatal collapse in March of a pedestrian bridge at Florida International University in Sweetwater focuses attention on the widely discussed pre-collapse cracking in the main span. The report also confirms accounts about what the construction crew working on the bridge was doing before the structure fell. But the report contains no definitive explanation of what occurred and months and possibly years more will be needed to determine the probable cause of the failure, which killed five motorists and one project worker.

When a 175-foot stretch of a concrete bridge collapsed Thursday afternoon over Southwest Eighth Street, slamming down onto cars waiting at a stoplight, a prominent construction team instantly came under scrutiny. Munilla Construction Management and FIGG Bridge Group, the firms behind the $14.3 million walkway connecting Florida International University to the tiny blue-collar burb of Sweetwater, have a long history of massive public works projects, political donations — and a few safety issues. MCM is one of the most influential construction firms in Miami-Dade, and its executives are significant donors in county races. Pedro Munilla, the partner and company vice...

Aerial footage shows the aftermath of the FIU pedestrian bridge collapsing on Southwest Eighth Street in Miami on March 15, 2018. Pedro Portal Miami Herald In the hours after a 950-ton pedestrian bridge over Tamiami Trail collapsed Thursday afternoon, killing at least four people, civil engineers began to speculate about potential causes. Was it a design error? Did something go wrong during construction? The answer may be buried deep in the calculations made by workers who were conducting a stress test on the unfinished and vulnerable bridge. Any such test, experts told the Miami Herald, requires extreme care and precision...