Schoharie Creek Bridge Collapse

Suspension bridges usually experience torsional forces during very windy conditions where there are high wind speeds, this can create a twisting force causing the deck to rotate resulting in the bridge experiencing shear stress. (Bagga

Bridges are a vital part of people’s everyday life and without them people would not be able to do nearly as much as is possible today. The weather in the outer banks of North Carolina is very rough and can be very detrimental to the various structures on them. When hurricanes come near North Carolina the outer banks are hit the worst. Bridges on the outer banks keep being destroyed by weather and so the people there have to think about the cost, the effectiveness, and the need between a strong expensive bridge that will be able to handle rough weather or a cheap quick to build bridges that may fall with any extreme weather.

•September/2016 - After the layout of the gravel and topsoil has been accomplished the next process is to begin the building of any bridges over waterways and boardwalks to include low, wet spots that were unable to be dugout. Due to the use of equestrian or ATv usage the bridges will need to be structurally strong using items such as steel or high strength treated lumber.

The I-35W Bridge, located in Minneapolis, Minnesota, was a bridge that opened in November of 1967 and was designed by Sverdrup & Parcel and Associates, Inc. The bridge had a truss arch design that spanned a total distance across the Mississippi River of 1907 feet. Also, the bridge was a deck truss which means the roadway was located on top of the truss itself. With a total of 4 piers, 2 on either side of the Mississippi River, that supported the bridge, the I-35W Bridge crossed the Mississippi River in 3 main spans; the longest span, which was located directly above the river, was 458 feet long. On August 1, 2007, the I-35W Bridge collapsed and sent the 80+ vehicles on the bridge into the Mississippi River.

Bridges are structures that become very susceptible as time passes. In Oregon there have been many bridges being identified to be seismic vulnerable. In an article by Ed Jahn, he sates, “nearly sixty percent of state-identified lifeline bridges likely to collapse or be potentially taken out of use after a quake” (Jahn). Bridges are a whole different story because they aren’t easy to be re-evaluated when they are used constantly by people to get around. The problem with many of these structures, though is that more than half of these bridges were built before 1970 (Jahn). Because of this they aren’t reinforced with new building codes making them highly vulnerable to any disaster to the point of collapsing. It isn’t an easy thing to fix the problems with a bridge because many seem stable but are still at great risk. It is known that “Today, they're still building fracture critical bridges with the belief that they're not going to break,” (Rosenker). Even when a bridge is being identified to see if it’s stable a lot of the time they are thought to be ok, but are really in a bad condition. Because they aren’t fully evaluated, and if a disaster were to hit in a certain location it could cause the bridge to

In 1989, an earthquake caused the top deck of the bridge to collapse. This has raised concern in recent years in the case of a large scale earthquake. During an inspection in September of 2009, a 1.5 inch crack was found in a structural truss called an eyebar. The system of the truss is meant to distribute report will describe the tensile load from the weight of the bridge over 4 eyebars. One of them being broken, this same load was now distributed between only 3 eyebars. Because these eyebars were not designed to carry extra load, it became crucially important to repair the eyebar as soon as possible. However, because the bridge is so old, its mechanisms were more complex than what would be designed now in the current day. The engineering company C.C. Myers was contracted to do the repair. C.C Myers decided to repair the eyebar by welding a crossbar to the saddles which had been placed on each end of the broken eyebar (Alfrey, 2010). Four tie rods were then bolted to distribute the tensile load (Reid, 2010). This repair was completed in only 70 hours (Carlsen,

When the bridge was tested, at 26 pounds of pressure, it began to buckle. The top support near the middle of the bridge on one side caved in, and as the weight increased, more of the top supports collapsed. At 47.3 pounds of pressure, the bridge snapped in half. By the end of the testing, the bridge had lost all of it’s top supports, two sections of diagonal supports on either side, and a small portion of the roadway.

This report mainly presents causes and consequences that resulted in the structural failure of the I-35W Mississippi River bridge which was constructed since 1964 and the further implication for me. It was found that the bridge collapsed due to undersized gusset plates, inefficient maintenance project and overloaded equipments. As a result of the abrupt collapse that brought about 13 dead and 145 injurers, the state government carried out a series of effective rescue, forced the designing company to pay the price and exerted themselves to eliminate pressures imposed on both traffic and business. It can be concluded that qualified engineers are required to be both ware of social responsibilities of engineers and adept at the professional skills that they specialised respectively.

The deck was originally wooden planking, later covered with asphalt, which was renewed in 2009.[ The weight of the bridge, approximately 1,500 tons.

Collision forces, caused either by a service vehicle striking the structure, or by some moving object in the channel beneath the bridge, for the foundation of a bridge may be struck by logs, ice, by a ship, or by a derailed locomotive;

The west coast of North America is filled with many different environments and the various natural disasters present there. The effects of these disasters can be seen through the myriad bridge collapses we have had in the last 100 years. California is rife with earthquakes and they have caused many different bridges, such as the Antelope Valley Freeway Interchange or the Cypress Viaduct to collapse. Landslides and floods have also caused many different bridges to fall including the John Day River Bridge, the Tex Wash Bridge, and the Pfeiffer Bridge. Natural disasters are not the only thing that can take down a bridge; in fact, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the Skagit River Bridge, and the Peace River Bridge were taken down through human error.

The North Fork Campbell Creek Bridge is a prestressed, reinforced-concrete girder bridge aligned primarily in the north-south direction and located in Anchorage, Alaska. It is a combined four lane highway structure constructed in 2007.The bridge has three continuous spans supported by two center piers with total length 109 m. The bridge has a slight curvature in profile and is skewed in plane. Each span consists of 11 prestressed RC girders, connected to each other by the diaphragms and shear connectors, and an asphalt concrete layer on the top of them. Each girder is supported by steel reinforced elastomeric bearing pads at the abutments and pier caps. The piers and seat-type abutments of the bridge are skewed at an angle of 65° compared

Bridges collapse because either their design or construction fail to meet contemporary industry standards, or those standards are inadequate to ensure safety in the face of unexpected circumstances. (Wallace, Jonathan).

Construction activities can discharge several pollutant and can also lead to soil erosion during stormwater runoff. To protect the environmental damage it is important to develop and

In 1940 one of the most modern with the most advanced design suspension bridge Tacoma Narrows collapsed. According to the Board of Experts, the pivotal event in the bridge’s collapse, was the change from the vertical waves to the destructive twisting, torsional motion. This event was associated with the slippage of cable bands at mid span. Normally, the main cables are of equal length where the mid-span cable band attaches them to the deck. When the cable band slipped, the north cable became separated into two segments of unequal length. The unbalance translated quickly to the thin, flexible plate girders, which twisted easily. Once the unbalanced motion began, progressive failure followed.