Bridge collapse near Genoa (IT)

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Capetonian

Bridge collapse near Genoa (IT)

#1 Post by Capetonian » Tue Aug 14, 2018 2:25 pm

Tragically it looks as if a couple of dozen people have been killed when a motorway bridge near Genoa collapsed this morning. I have driven over that bridge several times and it always looked and felt unsafe, like a very crude Meccano construction. You could hear it creaking and clanking. My brother-in-law drove over it yesterday.

Quite how something so important can be allowed to deteriorate so badly in a reasonably advanced country in this day and age is beyond me. This is not a one-off accident, it's a result of neglect and negligence.

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Re: Bridge collapse near Genoa (IT)

#2 Post by OFSO » Tue Aug 14, 2018 2:58 pm

When I had an Italian girlfriend in Riva Trigosa (that's a place, not the name of an Italian position for copulation) I used to drive over that bridge several times a year. I used to wonder how it stayed up, and for so long. Today my wondering was answered - it didn't, and no longer.

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Re: Bridge collapse near Genoa (IT)

#3 Post by Alisoncc » Tue Aug 14, 2018 3:05 pm

You might be surprised by how many bridges and overpasses in the US are deemed unsafe and closed to traffic. Some countries have these massive infrastructure build programs, but bugger all maintenance is then carried out. Read an article some years ago about the number of bridges and similar closed just in New York and it's surrounds.

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Re: Bridge collapse near Genoa (IT)

#4 Post by Fox3WheresMyBanana » Tue Aug 14, 2018 3:52 pm

I will pass on the advice I received from a recently retired US dam inspector a couple of years back - Don't go near any dams.
It wasn't just the underinvestment and deliberate concealment of problems but the skills (or lack of) of the new generation of dam engineers.

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Re: Bridge collapse near Genoa (IT)

#5 Post by Boac » Tue Aug 14, 2018 4:17 pm

OFSO wrote: I used to wonder how it stayed up, and for so long
- ah - these Italian women..... :))

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Re: Bridge collapse near Genoa (IT)

#6 Post by OFSO » Tue Aug 14, 2018 5:16 pm

The Girona TGV station flooded twice in the first six months after the million euro Madrid to Paris high speed line opened. Nobody noticed a nearby river. Yes, twice. And embankments had to be reinforced as rain does funny things to sandy soil if you don't plant herbiage to hold it together.

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Re: Bridge collapse near Genoa (IT)

#7 Post by probes » Tue Aug 14, 2018 9:24 pm

the lucky one:
Image

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Re: Bridge collapse near Genoa (IT)

#8 Post by OFSO » Thu Aug 16, 2018 8:49 am

Here we are, three days later. No CCTV footage, no eyewitness accounts, we don't know if the carriageway went first and brought the suspension tower down or vice versa. And it was the fifth bridge collapse in Italy since 2013. Frightening.

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Re: Bridge collapse near Genoa (IT)

#9 Post by Fox3WheresMyBanana » Thu Aug 16, 2018 10:24 am

Italian infrastructure spending has dropped by two thirds since 2008.
77chartoftheday_15079_investment_in_european_roads_n.jpg
77chartoftheday_15079_investment_in_european_roads_n.jpg (47.63 KiB) Viewed 1847 times
The state of the bridge can be seen by going to Google Maps, using 44.4260545,8.8873382 as the position, and looking up.

77Capture.JPG
77Capture.JPG (34.86 KiB) Viewed 1847 times
Knowing the Italians, all that black patching may just be duct tape.

The point I've captured is the western end of what is now the collapsed section, where the left hand support in the picture transitions to a deck section. That support is the same one you see the lucky truck on in Probes' picture above. It has not yet been reported where the collapse began. It may have been on the heavily patched point shown, but a failure elsewhere would tend to cause a break at the end of deck sections, so this repair may have been OK. We'll have to wait.

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Re: Bridge collapse near Genoa (IT)

#10 Post by OFSO » Thu Aug 16, 2018 1:04 pm

As ever, Il Capitano Col Senno di Poi - Captain Hindsight - has now sprung out of the cupboard waving over his head a list of other unsafe bridges and viaducts in Italy.

One is the motorway out to Fuimicino, Rome's main airport. The long section near the airport end is all viaduct, not very high, but it crosses the marshlands (which is why ancient Rome never expanded in that direction) with every individual pair of pillars terminating on a raft distributing the load on the ground. Obviously various factors such as dampness and substrate vary greatly and it's quite noticeable how some sections have sunk and some have not.

My first trip from the airport to Rome was maybe forty years ago and Tedesco, our driver, told me then they had a lot or trouble stabilising the ground to build the motorway. My last trip along that section of road was two years ago and it resembles a ride on a fairground switchback more than ever.

The traffic load is very high, day and night, which 'explains' why it has never been taken out of service for maintenance..

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Re: Bridge collapse near Genoa (IT)

#11 Post by OFSO » Thu Aug 16, 2018 1:29 pm

A quick search uncovered this photo of the Genoa motorway captioned "taken two days ago". Note the work in progress.......
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Re: Bridge collapse near Genoa (IT)

#12 Post by OFSO » Thu Aug 16, 2018 1:39 pm

Looks like the sections which are on trestles (and still standing) and the suspension section (which has fallen), were connected with a 'short' length resting at each end on the other parts. Would this be to build flexibility into the viaduct (wind, earthquakes, temparature variations) ? And did that short section at the western end detach and fall straight down, I wonder ?

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Re: Bridge collapse near Genoa (IT)

#13 Post by Fox3WheresMyBanana » Thu Aug 16, 2018 2:17 pm

Civil engineering is the weakest bit of my engineering knowledge, so I am very open to corrections here. Temperature variations are usually handled by expansion joints and bearings. One will notice these every so often through the suspension of one's vehicle when crossing, or by metal plates which cover them. Wind loading means a stiff bridge is necessary, possibly with friction dampers also. The Millennium Bridge in London, and its modifications, are a good example of the technology, although here the excess flexibility was caused by the load (pedestrians). Earthquakes provide several challenges, but the foundations are normally the most critical area.
The biggest problems with this bridge appears to be far more use of concrete than now, and far less redundancy in the design. Concrete is a composite material, and these are notoriously difficult to assess the level of serviceability of, especially as they deteriorate with age. The same is true of carbon fibre and fibreglass in aircraft. Bear in mind also that the same applies to any repairs made with the same materials.
It is also therefore harder to assess the effects of any changes in use. There seem to be strong indications that the bridge was frequently affected by traffic delays, which would obviously lead to very large loadings from tailbacks. As to trucks driving overweight, this seems to be increasingly common in Europe, and will obviously be a major factor.

Concrete is porous, and the primary mode of deterioration appears to be chloride contamination causing deterioration at the concrete/steel reinforcement boundary within the material*. This can be caused by poor initial concrete, or by exposure to salt. Genoa is right on the Mediterranean coast, the Med is slightly saltier that the average ocean, and the city gets 42 inches of rain a year. By comparison, Manchester gets 32 inches. So, there's your culprit.

The NYT article seems to be a good summary of the background.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/15/worl ... lapse.html

From the poor bit of video I've seen, the redundancy problem seems to have caused the entire suspension tower to collapse rapidly, in stages, after the first part of the structure failed. I have not seen video of the start of the collapse, so I don't know what went first. A guess would be one of the four suspension arms at the top of the tower, but that's just a guess. There was certainly a lot of repair work done up there, it's a classic weak point, and a failure there could lead to complete tower collapse. It probably gets a lot of salt from being in low cloud tops and rain.

That the bridge failed does not seem to be a surprise to anybody, and there have been several informed predictions of its failure in the last decade. It would appear repairs were inadequate due to the difficulties described above, and the expense of them on this type of bridge. The initial design was of course relatively cheap and pretty, which were the priorities in the 1960s. We don't build bridges like that now. Problems with concrete are not confined to Italy - the M6 through Birmingham is another example of rapid deterioration of 1960s concrete. One of the key factors in not replacing it was the concern over costs being excessive due to Mafia corruption.

* https://dspace.lboro.ac.uk/dspace-jspui ... doulou.pdf

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Re: Bridge collapse near Genoa (IT)

#14 Post by OFSO » Fri Aug 17, 2018 5:34 am

A clip from Italian TV last night showed at least one tower had been modified with a huge steel (?) cap on top, steel (?) plates at road level, and steel cables between the two run externally alongside and strapped to the concrete suspension elements. No sign of same work being carried out on other tower. To me the repair shows clear knowledge of incipient failure of original design.

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Re: Bridge collapse near Genoa (IT)

#15 Post by Capetonian » Fri Aug 17, 2018 7:51 am

This article sums up so much of what is right, and wrong, about Italy.
The Genoa bridge disaster exposes the precariousness of life in Italy

Italians will see it as a metaphor for the rottenness at the heart of the Italian state and of the Italian establishment. For behind the tragedy of the collapse of the Morandi Bridge in Genoa this week is a terrible truth. Hundreds, if not thousands of bridges in Italy – say some experts – are deathtraps. And just as it is pretty common for apartment blocks, especially south of Rome, to explode as a result of gas leaks, so it is not unusual for Italy’s decaying infrastructure to cause appalling loss of life.

Yet the country – the beating pulse of Western civilisation – is full of bridges built by the Romans, and priceless Renaissance city centres that are still standing. In Puglia, in the deep south of the country, there are olive trees that are 2,000 years old. So I see the collapse of the bridge in Genoa as a metaphor for the precariousness of life itself in Italy, where I have lived for 20 years, and have somehow survived.

Every aspect of life here is precarious – whether it is your job, your innocence, your freedom, your friendships, your marriage, or indeed your life. I do not mean that in Italy all depends on chance, destiny or divine intervention, and that the Italians have got nothing to do with it. Good grief no! Life is precarious in Italy precisely because of the institutions and culture Italians have created.

I used to admire them for all stopping their cars and pulling over so diligently when an ambulance came screeching up behind or towards them. I now realise they are motivated not by altruism but by terror – terror of being hit by the ambulance.

There are often attempts to put things right. Matteo Salvini, interior minister and leader of the radical Right Lega, now in coalition with the alt-Left Five Star Movement, has promised to identify and jail all those responsible for the collapse of the Genoa bridge. But this is what Italian politicians say every time there is a catastrophe and yet they continue to happen, with disturbing regularity.

Eye-witnesses – in this case – say the bridge collapsed after being struck by lightning in a terrible thunder storm after weeks of infernal heat. Genoa itself – where the founder of the Five Star movement Beppe Grillo, a Latin version of Billy Connolly, comes from – has been hit several times in recent years by devastating flash floods. The worst, in 2011, killed seven people. In the 2016 flood, archbishops and editors accused elected politicians of “shameful” negligence.

But nothing really changes because everything is paralysed by the country’s labyrinthine bureaucracy, as well as by its incompetent and arbitrary judicial system. And, as a result, we all in Italy fear the knock on the door.

The terrible earthquakes that have happened in recent years are the classic example. A friend of mine’s family own a lovely old house in L’Aquila, devastated by the 2009 earthquake. They still can’t move back home and his father, an architect, who knew how the system works, is now dead.

To sort out the infrastructure would require truckloads of borrowed cash, but Italy is a prisoner of the euro and its public debt is already 132 per cent of GDP (the fourth highest in the world among major countries), costing €80 billion (£71 billion) a year in interest.

"Americans invest more in tiny Belgium than in Italy – the Eurozone’s third largest economy – and less in the EU only in Greece, because in Italy it is virtually impossible to enforce a contract"

Top to bottom dishonesty makes things even harder. Until 2013, I was a columnist for a regional newspaper here whose owner stopped paying staff. I gave up after three months without pay but many colleagues worked on for two years for free – and then the paper folded. No one ever got any money. Our contracts were, in practice, worthless.

Then US Ambassador to Rome, John Phillips, told an audience at Milan’s Bocconi University in 2016 that Americans invest more in tiny Belgium than in Italy – the Eurozone’s third largest economy – and less in the EU only in Greece, because in Italy it is virtually impossible to enforce a contract thanks to the terrifyingly bad justice system.

The French philosopher Montesquieu wrote in the 18th century that liberty has never flourished where the orange grows – and without liberty there can be no safety. Italy is a country of wild extremes, of great beauty and great ugliness, but you have to watch your step, every step of the way.

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Re: Bridge collapse near Genoa (IT)

#16 Post by G-CPTN » Fri Aug 17, 2018 7:59 am

With respect, that article is illogical garbage.

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Re: Bridge collapse near Genoa (IT)

#17 Post by Capetonian » Fri Aug 17, 2018 8:04 am

I don't think it is illogical garbage at all. I think it is a very apt summary of Italy today, a country of great dichotomies, crumbling under pressure from many areas, in the grip of forces beyond its control, hurtling towards disaster.

May I ask why you are so dismissive of the article?

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Re: Bridge collapse near Genoa (IT)

#18 Post by G-CPTN » Fri Aug 17, 2018 8:15 am

Capetonian wrote:
Fri Aug 17, 2018 8:04 am
May I ask why you are so dismissive of the article?
It just seems to lack a consistent theme other than generalisations of chaos.

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Re: Bridge collapse near Genoa (IT)

#19 Post by Capetonian » Fri Aug 17, 2018 8:19 am

It just seems to lack a consistent theme other than generalisations of chaos.
Which is precisely why it is so apt in the context of Italy today. It does mention the positives too and as someone who travels to and through Italy quite often, I think it's quite balanced.

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Re: Bridge collapse near Genoa (IT)

#20 Post by OFSO » Fri Aug 17, 2018 4:17 pm

A couple of years ago I attended a conference at Rome university. I have never been in such a grubby unkempt building, filthy ceilings around the air ducts, stained carpets, scratched walls. Outside layers of peeling posters had blown the plaster and rubbish was dumped In the front yard. We were supposed to receive transcripts of the proceedings - still waiting today. Italians are lovely people, by and large, but their country is a disaster.

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