An overpass collapsed Thursday in a Brazilian World Cup host city, killing at least two people and trapping a commuter bus, two construction trucks and one car, authorities said. Read more: http://on.rt.com/kabegn
BRAZIL – BETTER AT SOCCER THAN ENGINEERING
The bridge flopped.
Bridge, 2 —- Pedestrians, 0
Who are WE to talk, what with the I-35 collapse in Minneapolis?
I have a lot more trust in civil engineers, than I do the politicians and contractors who implement their plans, and I’d attribute most collapses not to bad engineering per se, but to lack of maintenance and, most of all, contractor corner-cutting. A contractor rebuilding the lower deck of the Eads Bridge between St Louis and IL for commuter rail, was apprehended substituting bolts of a much smaller size and lesser strenght- had not an iron worker dropped the dime on that contractor, a trainload of passengers might have been dumped into the Mississippi a year or so later.
However, engineers DO sometimes miscalculate pretty badly. The I-5 Skagit River bridge seems to have been slightly under-engineered even for the year in which it was built, 1955. However, that, too, was probably the result of too much emphasis on cutting costs. Seems to me that almost every structure built since WW2 has been engineered to the minimum because costs and/or profits are the first consideration.
I-35 collapsed after years, if not decades of service. The Skagit River bridge was actually hit by a truck traveling at highway speeds that was too tall. This caused the support structure to buckle and collapse.