Last summer when there was the Minneapolis bridge collapse, I was thoroughly annoyed because I knew I had some really good photos of the bridge intact from underneath, with a focus on the steel, and I simply could not find them. Today I randomly stumbled across them, so here we go. From underneath, taken on [...]
It’s been quite a while now since my posts about the Minneapolis bridge collapse last summer, but my closet interest in structural engineering has not gone away. Today Mental Floss had a great list of the biggest recent “oops” moments in Structural Engineering and it’s a lot of fun. London’s infamous wobbly bridge made the [...]
I stumbled onto the most amazing video this weekend while mindlessly surfing to try and unwind from waaaay too many hours working. The Minneapolis connection was irresistible even though the story is nothing but bizarre. Here we have the theory, by a group of fundamentalist Christians in Texas, suggesting that the I-35(W) bridge [...]
I knew I returned to England from Minneapolis too soon. There’s so much excitement there I don’t know where to begin. The 10th avenue bridge (one block from, and parallel to, the missing 35W bridge) is now open with a large pedestrian viewing area. That is the bridge that would take [...]
This is my third attempt to post a photo of the non-existing 35W bridge in Minneapolis. Fortunately it appears to have worked, so I can get back to my actual comments on the subject! I seem to be suffering from the usual “WordPress somehow updated their software and I had to update my [...]
Continuing the travel adventure story, I picked up my rental car at the airport and started driving for the first time in almost a year. What a feeling! I left the airport the way I normally would, and immediately… set out for my old neighborhood. Turned off the crosstown onto 55/Hiawatha heading north towards Minneapolis. [...]
Kare11 reports on the NTSB plan for bridge analysis, but doesn’t get the engineering aspects quite right (I know, how terribly shocking and surprising, right?) They say:
He said that investigators were going to take a look at any unique design features that could have created a shift of 50 feet. To assist investigators they’ll [...]
OK, so I am not a civil engineer, nor am I a bridge expert in any way. However, I do have degrees in both mechanics and materials engineering, and I have to say, this morning the news is full of increasing nonsense about the bridge collapse. For example: from the BBC,
Such complete [...]
I lived for a number of years less than a mile from the freeway bridge that collapsed catastrophically and without apparent reason yesterday in Minneapolis. Because it was my own neighborhood, I almost never drove across that bridge–the traffic was terrible and the location extremely close to both the University and downtown, such that [...]
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