Miami Pedestrian Bridge Collapses

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Cackalacky

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greyhammer90 said:
So is the construction method likely going to be the whipping boy on this, or was it more the implementation of that method that created the problem?
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Could be both to an extent. I dont know really. Liability is always a tricky issue becasue of the redundancy in the process. Hard to know who is on the hook, but as stated in the article, construction and that includes approved means and methods is much more likely than the design (including choice of materials and the strength of materials used), which is what I do, professionally. If I understand the articles correctly the span was constructed on site ( off to the side of the roadway) and then moved into place. There are certainly things that cold have happens in the process there. It appears as well they may have been doing stress tests or even tensioning of the reinforcing steel without closing the road. Not sure how that was ever allowed to take place, although I admittedly no little about post tension concrete construction.

As designers we take the worst case loads (wind, earthquake, live dead, snow, rain ice, construction etc), artificially inflate the loads, then reduce the material strength needed to meet those inflated loads which results in structures that can resist loads that are much stronger than the loads that structure will actually ever see. I highly doubt the design of the span is an issue.
 
IrishLax

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Rogue219 said:
I believe Florida is a Right to Work state, correct?
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Yes, it is, and in the industry Florida has pretty notoriously bad quality control in construction. Had to do some consulting in February for an MLB team down there and they did not have kind things to say about Florida labor/craftsmanship quality. And that's kind of an obvious statement because they never would've called me in the first place if everything went well during construction, but yeah....

With that being said, it should also be obvious that I could give you a list of MANY union jobs with union labor where construction fatalities and large mistakes have happened. Union contractors generally do a better job protecting their own workers than non-union companies... they have better, more regularly enforced safety programs and their employees are more likely to say something about unsafe conditions. However, there isn't any hard evidence that I'm aware of that union labor does a better job of limiting mistakes that affect public safety. I'm sure I could find some biased "study" or anecdote from a pro-union source that points towards non-union workers endangering the public, but I'm not aware of any objective hard evidence that the public safety incident rate is higher for "open shop" companies.
 
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IrishLax said:
Yes, it is, and in the industry Florida has pretty notoriously bad quality control in construction. Had to do some consulting in February for an MLB team down there and they did not have kind things to say about Florida labor/craftsmanship quality. And that's kind of an obvious statement because they never would've called me in the first place if everything went well during construction, but yeah....

With that being said, it should also be obvious that I could give you a list of MANY union jobs with union labor where construction fatalities and large mistakes have happened. Union contractors generally do a better job protecting their own workers than non-union companies... they have better, more regularly enforced safety programs and their employees are more likely to say something about unsafe conditions. However, there isn't any hard evidence that I'm aware of that union labor does a better job of limiting mistakes that affect public safety. I'm sure I could find some biased "study" or anecdote from a pro-union source that points towards non-union workers endangering the public, but I'm not aware of any objective hard evidence that the public safety incident rate is higher for "open shop" companies.
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My friend was on the job at the new Marlins park as a contractor and said there was some shoddy stuff going on.
 
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Cackalacky

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Irish YJ

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Cackalacky said:
I am sure Lax can confirm but concrete is designed to have cracks on tension side of slabs or beams. Is why we put steel in those regions. Cracks are expected. The problem is that cracks indicate a problem and the steel is there to not allow an immediate brittle failure. Seems like this was more of an during the stress test/tensioning.
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New shiny bridges should not have cracks Cack

Seriously though, a big thank you to you, and the other guys for all the great input on this thread.
 
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Cackalacky

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Irish YJ said:
New shiny bridges should not have cracks Cack

Seriously though, a big thank you to you, and the other guys for all the great input on this thread.
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Don’t get wrong... cracks are undesirable for many reasons but they aren’t inherently a bad thing. It just means that part of the concrete is in tension and concrete is very weak in tension which is why we have steel there which is awesome in tension. Admittedly though I know much less about PT concrete than normal concrete design.
 
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Cackalacky

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I love the internet. Brittle failure of a tension rod during tensioning on the lagoon side.
 
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