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I would just advice to wait for the NTSB report. Cracks are very difficult to judge without knowing the structural analysis in detail. Yes the crack looks quite and it needs attention for corrosion prevention. This photo alone doesn't tell anything. I couldn't tell where on the bridge the crack was and if it is from the crashed bridge. The FIU bridge looked like a truss bridge. While on steel truss bridges the truss nodes are calculated as freely rotatable, they are rigid on the concrete FIU bridge. If you don't include this rigidity into your structural analysis or the reinforcement design you get cracks and a freely rotatable node. But the structural integrity is still guaranteed. I would expect that the cracks were examined. If the following judgement was correct or not the NTSB report will hopefully show [quote user="Euclid"]Apparently the bridge integrity, after it was questioned due to the discovery of cracks, was just an opinion; and not subjected to a conclusive engineering analysis;[/quote] We don't know what was done to verify if the cracks were harmless or not. In many cases you don't need any anylysis. Detailed knowledge of structural analysis and reinforcement drawings is often enough to determine the cause of a crack and its severity. The Accelerated Bridge Construction has nothing to do with speed of construction. I find the term misleading. The bridge is built in normal speed beside the final site to avoid interrupting the traffic over the whole construction period. ABC limits the traffic interruption to the time needed to move the bridge from the building site to the final site. If there had been problems with the crack found before moving the bridge it could have been fixed without endangering ABC. Regards, Volker
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