what is odd is that you almost always see collapses like this when the bridge is struck from a barge or an earthquake. i can't think of an instance where volume would have caused something so catastrophic...but just to let everyone know, thanks to Homeland Security, this is not a terrorist act.....
Thank god you guys are OK. I know there are other Minneapolis 'necters out there whose names I am forgetting. A, are you out there still? And anyone else please check in....
Watching Keith Olbermann (who is awesome) .....he already brought up his "knowledge of architecture and engineering" in his reporting. They were saying something about "daytime pile-driving" because they were doing work on the bridge. This HAD to have had something to do with it....a bridge doesn't just stand for 40 years with a volume of 200,000+ cars every day and then just fall...
you know, looking at that photo has me thinking. if one of those concrete truss supports fails, then that whole bridge goes down, right? if that assumption is true, then i could conceive of the possibility that 40 years of wear from an active large river, crumbling concrete, rusting rebar, worn ties, pile driving, unstable soil would make for an explosive cocktail??
structure seems like had too many skinny members with thousands of welds and bolts + 40 years + 200000 cars passing vibrating + moisture from the river which steel likes to drink +, + ,+...
i am glad you guys are okay.
really bad collapse. steel members like matchsticks. as strange as it sounds but i hope nobody was carpooling.
Really glad everyone is ok. Does anyone know Colleen and Tom? Their not architects (or archinectors), but they're my friends and I can't get through. Worth a shot.
They brought up Tacoma Narrows earlier when I was watching. I wonder if they'll bring up the Hyatt....relative but on a completely different scale of course....
so sad to hear about this. I grew up in Mpls proper, first 20 years of my life. I lived in south Mpls, but did use this bridge pretty often. It is a MAJOR part of I-35. Traffic there is going to be horrible until they rebuild the bridge.
the interesting thing about the design of the bridge is that it appears that it wanted to take the structural properties of the arch and use it, but the truss flattens out...there isnt any camber to it
wierd enough that when i saw the collapse on drudge, the first place i looked was on archinect, didn't even bother calling the ex to see if her family was ok. ahhhh, feelings....
and yeah, that would be the 2nd bridge collapse in 24 hours, mdler.
concidentally, i was watching the simpsons on los angeles's local fox affiliate, fox 11 earlier (6:30 pm episode), and @ one moment there was reference to a bridge while a news ticker announcing the minneapolis bridge collapse ran along the bottom.
very weird. i'm sure they could not have known that that particular episode (probably scheduled weeks in advance) made reference to a bridge.
anyway, glad to hear the minnapolis archinector/er/eur/s etc. are ok.
I'm ok. Left work early for a party and drove right underneath that bridge at about 4:30. Along the Mississippi on the west side is a quite scenic, and great shortcut for getting around the downtown area. Still a bit surrealistic that I had passed by just before a tragedy like this. Someone announced the news at the bar we were at and they switched all the tv's over.
This bridge is part of a major artery for all the northern suburbs of Mpls. I would presume traffic on the north side of town will be severly disrupted for quite some time. I have a meeting downtown in a couple hours, planning to leave home early, as I'm sure all local roads will be seeing heavy use.
i'm glad to hear that y'all are alright... this collapse was strikingly similar to the collapse of the skyway bridge here in st. petersburg back in 1980... although in the case of the skyway it was hit by a barge that lost power... there was even a bus (which is always talked about as a school bus in the urban legends, but was actually a greyhound)... 35 people died...
My friends are slowly checking in as people wake up today. Most of the people that I know use 35W to get to and from work each day have responded, but there are a few that i'm specifically concerned about that have yet to reply. It's tough to get ahold of people sine all I have to contact them with is a text message software on my computer.
It's mind boggling as I used to drive across that bridge at least twice a day to get to work. My house was just off the 4th St/University exit as you came off the river. Scary stuff indeed, the city is gonna have a hell of a time getting people around for the coming months. 94 and 280 are packed as it is, and now they're going to have the congestion of 35W on top of that.
I don't post here much, but I figured i'd add in a little hello to my fellow twin cities people. I live a block away from 35W, I can see the bridge from the back of my apartment. Seeing this on TV was bizarre but when my friend and I walked across the street to see the bridge it was just unreal. We watched live footage of a semi on fire and then started smelling smoke/burning rubber in my apartment moments later.
I have never seen anything like it in my life and hope I never do again. Just to give you an idea of where this is...
We watched dozens of emergency vehicles come off the 35W South exit ramp last night from my living room from every surrounding area, hundreds of tow trucks, every police dept, rescue boats, ambulances, fire trucks etc. Just up the street civilians were directing traffic, one kid would run down the block alerting the people at the intersection that emergency vehicles were coming and traffic would just split instantly, it was amazing seeing people working together like that.
This morning it's not much better, the gawkers are gone but the media has descended, I was interviewed on my way to work. It's all pretty surreal.
I was outside actually two blocks away with a friend. The most bizarre thing is I have no recollection of hearing anything that would sound like a bridge collapsing. You probably know how loud it is in that area, one gets accustomed to hearing and ignoring the noise living near a freeway. Again the whole thing is just so crazy
as suspected, the roads downtown are just jammed. seems like a lot of people to the north are taking Hennepin ave and 3rd ave bridges into the downtown area. it's nice getting into the office to find out everyone is ok.
my commute down lyndale was slightly more congested then usual, but the light at Lake street was blinking red, so 5 minutes of dealing with that snafu caused by the construction there.
off a webpage written by John Week, author of The Bridges And Structures Of The Major Rivers Of Minneapolis And St. Paul:
A University of Minnesota Civil Engineer in a report to MN-DOT recently noted that this bridge is considered to be a non-redundant structure. That is, if any one member fails, the entire bridge can collapse. A key factor is that there are only four pylons holding up the arch. Any damage to any one pylon would be catastropic. The textbook example of a non-redundant bridge is the Silver Bridge over the Ohio River. It failed shortly before Christmas in 1967 resulting in 46 deaths. A single piece of hardware failed due to a tiny manufacturing defect. But that piece was non-redundant, and the entire bridge collapsed into the icy river. Today, bridge engineers design bridges so that any single piece of the bridge can fail without causing the entire bridge to collapse. It is tragic that the I-35W bridge was built a few years too early to benefit from that lesson.
The National Bridge Inventory contains a report on this bridge from 2003. It reports the following items:
* Deck Condition: Fair.
* Superstructure Condition: Poor.
* Substructure Condition: Satisfactory.
* Scour: Foundations determined to be stable.
* Bridge Railings: Meets currently acceptable standards.
* Structural Evaluation: Meets minimum tolerable limits to be left in place as-is.
* Water Adequacy Evaluation: Superior to present desirable criteria.
* Bridge Sufficiency Rating: 50%
Cris, that simpsons story is creepily redundant to an experience i had yesterday. i found out about the bridge collapse on the news, then i was informed that the bridge that i used to take train rides over in pennsylvania had collapsed some time ago, then i started to read a book and the first two pages talk about a bridge collapse.. all within 10 minutes of each other. freaky stuff.
this news is creating some wannabe structural engineers, i've noticed. my family is suddenly having conversations on bridge design and debating on what went wrong with this one..
Twin Cities Shout Out.
I am okay, in case anyone gave a shit. I was just over that bridge last night.
Killa and anyone else from TC give a shout.
Peace.
Hey Beta,
I just heard about this in NZ - thought about the Twin City Archinectors. Glad you are good.
d
Holy crap! I just saw this! WTF? How does a bridge just collapse?
I'm glad you are OK beta.
I'm fine too. my wife drove over this span earlier today... no cell phone service (like post 9-11) everybody is trying to talk...
got another thread going here for news...
my mother-in-law just got through on the phone- she'll call my folks.
I just paged over here to make sure that you two were all right. Glad to know you avoided the damage.
Glad to hear you're okay.
"...an engineering and construction error..."
I bet we'll be discussing this one on Archinect for quite some time.
what is odd is that you almost always see collapses like this when the bridge is struck from a barge or an earthquake. i can't think of an instance where volume would have caused something so catastrophic...but just to let everyone know, thanks to Homeland Security, this is not a terrorist act.....
I was wondering the same if there is a boat involved? too much redundancy for simple collapse to happen (i'd hope), so did a support shift?
prolly a ground fault/earth shift......
hope everyone is ok/alive
b
Thank god you guys are OK. I know there are other Minneapolis 'necters out there whose names I am forgetting. A, are you out there still? And anyone else please check in....
just talked to my sister...she is fine
looks like a certain administration should re-direct some $$$ towards OUR infastructure and not Iraq's
Watching Keith Olbermann (who is awesome) .....he already brought up his "knowledge of architecture and engineering" in his reporting. They were saying something about "daytime pile-driving" because they were doing work on the bridge. This HAD to have had something to do with it....a bridge doesn't just stand for 40 years with a volume of 200,000+ cars every day and then just fall...
Totally agree, mdler.
mdler, I totally agree!
I am still waiting to hear from my cousin. She lives outside the city though so I am not terribly worried.
unrelated, but a very interesting article
http://www.duke.edu/~hpgavin/ce131/citicorp1.htm
now we got a thunderstorm rolling through (though not that severe). beta called to see if I was ok- thanks...
what it used to look like.
archinect is awesome. i read this on my 'net news front page one minute and the next i get to see that you guys in mpls are ok.
oh, and i third what mdler said.
you know, looking at that photo has me thinking. if one of those concrete truss supports fails, then that whole bridge goes down, right? if that assumption is true, then i could conceive of the possibility that 40 years of wear from an active large river, crumbling concrete, rusting rebar, worn ties, pile driving, unstable soil would make for an explosive cocktail??
structure seems like had too many skinny members with thousands of welds and bolts + 40 years + 200000 cars passing vibrating + moisture from the river which steel likes to drink +, + ,+...
i am glad you guys are okay.
really bad collapse. steel members like matchsticks. as strange as it sounds but i hope nobody was carpooling.
oh, mdler's point about infrastructure is going to echo over and over in coming days.
Really glad everyone is ok. Does anyone know Colleen and Tom? Their not architects (or archinectors), but they're my friends and I can't get through. Worth a shot.
Email is getting through and some incoming calls are too. good luck reaching your friends.
my minneapple relatives e-mailed to say they rarely take that route and are OK. glad to see my archinectres are ok too.
Would this failure be due to resonance within the bridge?
They brought up Tacoma Narrows earlier when I was watching. I wonder if they'll bring up the Hyatt....relative but on a completely different scale of course....
so sad to hear about this. I grew up in Mpls proper, first 20 years of my life. I lived in south Mpls, but did use this bridge pretty often. It is a MAJOR part of I-35. Traffic there is going to be horrible until they rebuild the bridge.
i 5th...
glad to see that you local guys are alright.
the interesting thing about the design of the bridge is that it appears that it wanted to take the structural properties of the arch and use it, but the truss flattens out...there isnt any camber to it
I dont know if what I said makes sense...im drunk
I think this may be the second bridge collapse this week...didnt one fall in California
G W hasnt said anything about the collapse...maybe he invoked executive privelidge???
wierd enough that when i saw the collapse on drudge, the first place i looked was on archinect, didn't even bother calling the ex to see if her family was ok. ahhhh, feelings....
and yeah, that would be the 2nd bridge collapse in 24 hours, mdler.
wow, crazy. that is just nuts.
concidentally, i was watching the simpsons on los angeles's local fox affiliate, fox 11 earlier (6:30 pm episode), and @ one moment there was reference to a bridge while a news ticker announcing the minneapolis bridge collapse ran along the bottom.
very weird. i'm sure they could not have known that that particular episode (probably scheduled weeks in advance) made reference to a bridge.
anyway, glad to hear the minnapolis archinector/er/eur/s etc. are ok.
damnit, i'm struggling to get ahold of all my TC friends, and sine I just woke up and found out, everyone's asleep I'm sure.
stupid 6 hour time difference
hi beatle!
Glad to hear Archinectors are fine, it looks like it was pretty bad. mdler, your comment above was right on...
I'm ok. Left work early for a party and drove right underneath that bridge at about 4:30. Along the Mississippi on the west side is a quite scenic, and great shortcut for getting around the downtown area. Still a bit surrealistic that I had passed by just before a tragedy like this. Someone announced the news at the bar we were at and they switched all the tv's over.
This bridge is part of a major artery for all the northern suburbs of Mpls. I would presume traffic on the north side of town will be severly disrupted for quite some time. I have a meeting downtown in a couple hours, planning to leave home early, as I'm sure all local roads will be seeing heavy use.
beatle, have you been able to connect with your um friends?
glad to hear you're alright, aqua. i forgot you were up there, too.
Me too, aquapura. I remembered someone whose name started with a, but I couln't pull "aquapura" out of my brain. Thanks for checking in.
Glad you got to enjoy the scenery one last time!
i'm glad to hear that y'all are alright... this collapse was strikingly similar to the collapse of the skyway bridge here in st. petersburg back in 1980... although in the case of the skyway it was hit by a barge that lost power... there was even a bus (which is always talked about as a school bus in the urban legends, but was actually a greyhound)... 35 people died...
here's a story about some of the similarities
My friends are slowly checking in as people wake up today. Most of the people that I know use 35W to get to and from work each day have responded, but there are a few that i'm specifically concerned about that have yet to reply. It's tough to get ahold of people sine all I have to contact them with is a text message software on my computer.
It's mind boggling as I used to drive across that bridge at least twice a day to get to work. My house was just off the 4th St/University exit as you came off the river. Scary stuff indeed, the city is gonna have a hell of a time getting people around for the coming months. 94 and 280 are packed as it is, and now they're going to have the congestion of 35W on top of that.
I don't post here much, but I figured i'd add in a little hello to my fellow twin cities people. I live a block away from 35W, I can see the bridge from the back of my apartment. Seeing this on TV was bizarre but when my friend and I walked across the street to see the bridge it was just unreal. We watched live footage of a semi on fire and then started smelling smoke/burning rubber in my apartment moments later.
I have never seen anything like it in my life and hope I never do again. Just to give you an idea of where this is...
We watched dozens of emergency vehicles come off the 35W South exit ramp last night from my living room from every surrounding area, hundreds of tow trucks, every police dept, rescue boats, ambulances, fire trucks etc. Just up the street civilians were directing traffic, one kid would run down the block alerting the people at the intersection that emergency vehicles were coming and traffic would just split instantly, it was amazing seeing people working together like that.
This morning it's not much better, the gawkers are gone but the media has descended, I was interviewed on my way to work. It's all pretty surreal.
Imnop15, know the apartments you live in, you must of had a front row seat to the whole thing. Were you inside when it happened?
I was outside actually two blocks away with a friend. The most bizarre thing is I have no recollection of hearing anything that would sound like a bridge collapsing. You probably know how loud it is in that area, one gets accustomed to hearing and ignoring the noise living near a freeway. Again the whole thing is just so crazy
as suspected, the roads downtown are just jammed. seems like a lot of people to the north are taking Hennepin ave and 3rd ave bridges into the downtown area. it's nice getting into the office to find out everyone is ok.
my commute down lyndale was slightly more congested then usual, but the light at Lake street was blinking red, so 5 minutes of dealing with that snafu caused by the construction there.
off a webpage written by John Week, author of The Bridges And Structures Of The Major Rivers Of Minneapolis And St. Paul:
A University of Minnesota Civil Engineer in a report to MN-DOT recently noted that this bridge is considered to be a non-redundant structure. That is, if any one member fails, the entire bridge can collapse. A key factor is that there are only four pylons holding up the arch. Any damage to any one pylon would be catastropic. The textbook example of a non-redundant bridge is the Silver Bridge over the Ohio River. It failed shortly before Christmas in 1967 resulting in 46 deaths. A single piece of hardware failed due to a tiny manufacturing defect. But that piece was non-redundant, and the entire bridge collapsed into the icy river. Today, bridge engineers design bridges so that any single piece of the bridge can fail without causing the entire bridge to collapse. It is tragic that the I-35W bridge was built a few years too early to benefit from that lesson.
The National Bridge Inventory contains a report on this bridge from 2003. It reports the following items:
* Deck Condition: Fair.
* Superstructure Condition: Poor.
* Substructure Condition: Satisfactory.
* Scour: Foundations determined to be stable.
* Bridge Railings: Meets currently acceptable standards.
* Structural Evaluation: Meets minimum tolerable limits to be left in place as-is.
* Water Adequacy Evaluation: Superior to present desirable criteria.
* Bridge Sufficiency Rating: 50%
it's good to hear that everyone is safe and well.
Cris, that simpsons story is creepily redundant to an experience i had yesterday. i found out about the bridge collapse on the news, then i was informed that the bridge that i used to take train rides over in pennsylvania had collapsed some time ago, then i started to read a book and the first two pages talk about a bridge collapse.. all within 10 minutes of each other. freaky stuff.
this news is creating some wannabe structural engineers, i've noticed. my family is suddenly having conversations on bridge design and debating on what went wrong with this one..
of the bridge collapsion
Judging by that video it looks like a faliure at the first panel point out of that first pier.
But I thought wittnesses said it failed at the approach abutment first?
Anyone got the previous 10 seconds to that cnn video?
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