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‘Significant overload’ caused Norway’s timber bridge collapse
- londons_explore 4y agoTL;DR: One of the diagonal beams was only designed to be half the strength it needed to be, and it snapped. This type of bridge needs every beam - so when one broke, the whole thing fell. The mystery really is why it didn't collapse sooner - that's still under investigation.
- photoGrant 4y ago
- LegitShady 4y agoI used to enjoy a game called game developer simulator and I do wonder if modern day software development coukd start there instead of with a committee of diluted opinions tied to a budget irrelevant to the budget of software developer beyond a career or two In a sense star citizen may be the best managed game of all time Sometimes I wonder how experts in a technical field play a mobile bridge building game with toy physics and somehow believe themselves to be in position to replace actual experts in building bridges who actually are legally responsible for the outcomes of their work in a way the overwhelming majority of software devs won't ever face. Maybe just leave the mobile game for fun and take up a few classes in structural analysis, steel design, concrete design, wood design, highway geometric design, actual bridge design, and capital planning. Then when you have the same experience as the smallest baby bridge designers (because that's just the starting point - classes) see if your bridge game encompasses the risks and realities of designing and building a bridge. You ever had to do first nations consultation in your bridge game? Ever needed environmental approval in there? What sort of k factors your road curves have ever get checked against the code? Do horizontal and vertical alignment? Design a foundation that has to live as long as you or more? Do a flood analysis, or ice jam analysis, fish passage analysis or a million other things that could affect the hydrology of a watercourse under a bridges? Ever had a software project delayed because an endangered species of bird was nesting in your software and you legally couldn't remove it? How much time did you spend designing the asphalt mix for the road surface in your bridge game? Stick with software and your mobile game.
- photoGrant 4y agoSo many assumptions you're almost as bad as I am!
- LegitShady 4y agodid you edit the post i replied to so that people can't read what you wrote but are still defending your ego replying to me? for all the latecomers photogrant made a comment which was the first paragraph of my above comment except he played a bridge design simulator game and wondered why bridge design engineers werent using it to brainstorm solutions.
- guntherhermann 4y ago> did you edit the post i replied to so that people can't read what you wrote but are still defending your ego replying to me? I've found that it's worth quoting people you talk with on this forum
- hef19898 4y agoI actually never delete comments when I have replies, edits are my got to solution. I like my stupidity on display for everyone to learn from!
- photoGrant 4y agoIt was a joke that clearly didn't translate -- you put too much effort into this attacking me.
- hef19898 4y agoAn mechanical or industrial engineer you are not...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- silvestrov 4y agoThe homepage of the "Norwegian Safety Investigation Authority" is much more informative and the 2 documents have interesting photos, e.g. closeups of where the wood broke. https://www.nsia.no/Road/Investigations/22-441 https://www.nsia.no/Road/Investigations/22-441 It does not state why they conclude the cause was overload, only that "Uncovering the technical causal factors for the collapse of the Tretten bridge has been challenging. The expert group has worked its way through several hypotheses to be able to exclude non-relevant fracture mechanisms, by connecting findings to computational analyses. There was significant consequential damage to the bridge structure, both from the collapse itself, the impact with the ground and the salvage work, and it has been challenging to separate these from each other." Personally I would think that a bridge should be able to handle "A passenger car and a truck with trailer loaded with lime were on the bridge when it collapsed".
- bluGill 4y agoThere are a number of bridges where I live that cannot handle a truck with trailer. They have large signs warning what the maximum load is. They are mostly on rarely used roads in farm country (as in a handful of cars per week cross), so a truck with lime is one of the more likely potential loads, but of course the local farmers know that bridge can't handle the weight of a truck and plan their deliveries to take a different route (which often more than doubles the trip time vs if the bridge could handle the weight)
- bombcar 4y agoThe problem comes when those type of bridges don't collapse the first time someone overloads them; then people start using it because "eh it works" and eventually it fails.
- pmontra 4y agoIs there some well established way to make some very visible but not structural part of a bridge to collapse after an overload, to scare people and make them report the problem?
- GeompMankle 4y agoI think a fairly good argument can be made that the design of this bridge was novel to the point of being negligent as per https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSPI0xkTifI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSPI0xkTifI
- kevinwang 4y agoDamn, this is a really high quality, high effort video, with a lot of nice pictures. Thanks for posting.
- Sakos 4y agoIt's a fantastic channel. Watched all the videos on the Surfside condo collapse and they're all this high quality.
- piskerpan 4y agoI can’t get really past the guy’s attitude. From the get go he’s mocking the work from the marketing to materials, and he’s not doing it in a fun way. Just plain denigrating. I thought you linked to B1M or something.
- eCa 4y agoI’ve been watching his videos since Champlain Towers South, and this was the first video that I found off-putting. I would recommend giving him a chance or two, I especially found the CTS videos interesting.
- paganel 4y agoHe's correct, though, a bridge that collapses after only 10 years of use demands mockery (and worse) for the people that designed it. Especially as this new bridge replaced an existing one which had, indeed, been up for more than 100 years. It's very fortunate that no-one died because of the incompetence of the people involved in building it. My dad is a retired civil-engineer and he displays the same type of mockery (and worse) when he sees badly built stuff. Because he very well knows that badly built stuff can cause people to, well, die. It's not "they made an ooopsiee, let's not make it worse by denigrating the designers/builders", it's "they really f.ed things up, people could have died, they're morons (and worst)".
- rch 4y ago> head of the Centre for Wood Science ..., identified steel truss issues as a possible factor. You don't say...
- thordenmark 4y agoI frequently cross the Golden Gate bridge. This is my nightmare. Can you imagine plunging to your doom if that bridge failed? Yikes!
- toast0 4y agoOne morning I drove across the Tacoma Narrows Bridge and it was quite foggy. I couldn't see the road surface very far ahead of me and had to just assume it would be there. Thankfully, it was. When I drove across the return span later in the day, I was happy to see the whole bridge before I started.
- smilespray 4y agoSuggested viewing: Final Destination 5
- infamousclyde 4y agoAnti-recommendation system has potential
- giraffe_lady 4y agoMy intuition is that the huge iconic ones in globally significant metro areas probably receive closest to an adequate amount of attention and maintenance. I'm much more worried about like, a random 40 foot bridge outside of the second largest suburb of the third largest city in a southern state or whatever. A short fall into icy water or just getting bonked by a piece of the falling bridge at the bottom is less dramatic but you'd be just as dead. And I'm pretty sure those bridges haven't seen an attentive engineer since whenever they were finished.
- jessaustin 4y agoI'm much more worried about... Various ancient bridges near my rural home have been "saved" by local morons (here they might be called "hillbillies") who organize elaborate campaigns to demand that the highway department not close them despite their ill repair. In some cases an alternative bridge has been built nearby at vastly increased expense, in other cases it just means that only morons use the existing rusted-out (or in the case of the "swinging" variety, multiple-broken-planked) bridge, carefully driving so they don't drop a tire into the holes. How a utilitarian object riveted together out of commodity steel in 1910 is such a triumph of human will that it must be imposed on posterity forever, surpasses understanding.
- numbsafari 4y agoIt'd be neat to integrate ChatGPT into a "bridge builder simulator" type game, and have it generate post-mortem news reports like this one for the bridge failures.
- nottorp 4y agoConsidering what i saw posted about GPT thingies cost, you'd have to pay a subscription for that game.
- hatsubishi 4y ago
- mywittyname 4y agoBuilding Integrity on YouTube is a fabulous channel to watch if you're interested into deep dives into failures such as this. The host is a civil engineer who specializes in performing structural audits of older buildings (specifically condos, I think). He did a an episode on this bridge. It is excellent, and it provides some context about other timber bridges that is not discussed in this article.
- baking 4y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSPI0xkTifI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSPI0xkTifI
- tpmx 4y agoWell, then it was underdimensioned.
- pornel 4y agoCan someone provide background on this — what makes this accident and/or bridge notable?
- jseutter 4y agoIt's notable because it's practically a brand new bridge - only 10 years into its 100 year life span. Bridges that fail are typically much further into their projected life spans, and the ones that aren't make headlines (like Tacoma Narrows). It's also a novel design, so lots of heads will be scratched while figuring out where the mistakes were made. Was the mistake in analysis? Materials? Something else? I say novel design, but it's more like some novel techniques for combining wood and metal together. The basic bridge design is fairly common but typically built using all wood or all metal. When you look at it it's fairly similar to train bridges from last century.
- hackrnusr 4y agoCan't wait until all of the timber skyscrapers that they're building to fight global warming meet the same fate.