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[quote user="rjemery"] [quote user="joe-daddy"]Seems to me that an over-engineered bridge is a liability to few, while an under-engineered bridge is a libility to all.[/quote]No truer words were ever written.  Most highway bridges then and now, as we have learned from the media attention, were built without redundancy, meaning that if one critical part fails, the entire bridge fails.  Redundancy, however that is implemented within a design, was eliminated as a cost-saving measure. Already in Minnesota we see finger-pointing and back-pedaling.  Maintenance and inspections were shaved and shaved until disaster struck.  As with all accidents, it is rarely a single human failure.  Rather, it was a number of humans and decisions that finally came together catastrophically.Regardless of how frequently the I-35W bridge was being inspected, somebody more than once failed to get at a critical component that was slowly failing day-by-day.  Visual inspections are of and by themselves inadequate.  To be certain, high spans or spans over water make it difficult to get at all parts of both the superstructure and substructure. Clearly in this case, prolonged inadequate inspection has got to be one of the top if not the top cause of the failure.  I would not want to be in the shoes of whatever inspector last signed off on the I-35W bridge. [/quote]I have heard some discussion about how the I35W bridge was a product of a new era in bridge building that was marked by better calculations and sophisitcated trusses resulting in less redundancy and sleeker design.  I have also heard that this era quickly passed and was replaced by designs using massive "I" beams instead of sophisticated trusses.  It seems as though this bridge has long been considered vulnerable because it was born in this particular era of bridge art.I could not believe what I was hearing yesterday from MNDOT officials about the bridge.  They were complaining about how hard it was to inspect the bridge, citing pigeon poop as an impediment.  They said the material caused corrosion and obscurred the steel from inspection.  They also said that some welds, bolts, and plates were inside of pockets that were impossible to access for inspection.  They also complained that inspection was hampered by too many spiders living on the bridge.It seems to me that if the bridge was impossible to inspect, they should have closed it and solved that problem instead of just letting it fall down.
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