The number of structurally deficient bridges is actually down by about 7,000 from 2017, but those bridges weren’t fixed. The number fell because the Federal Highway Administration weakened the standards of what it means for a bridge to be deficient, the report explains.
The collapse of a bridge earlier this week in Tennessee is raising new alarms about the delicate state of infrastructure across the U.S.
America is literally collapsing alongside its figurative collapse and I think that’s neat
Well if you fixed your shit instead of buying shells for Gaza, you’d have a working bridge in the DC area right now.
I’m sorry af for the workers who were there, but it’s hard not to feel al bit of satisfaction after all the Amerikan aggression lately.
and none of them are designed to have a container ship hit them!
There’s another way of making that number go down
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46,999 now
Perhaps they need to build them back better?
how many structurally sufficient bridges are there?
I don’t know if many of them could survive 115000 tons of ship ramming them anyway.
None of them would, but the structurally sufficient ones probably have safety measures like Dolphins https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolphin_(structure)
Well, my lazy searching tells me there are approximately 600k bridges in the US, which is probably about right.
I also found this gem
There are more than 617,000 bridges across the United States. Currently, 42% of all bridges are at least 50 years old, and 46,154, or 7.5% of the nation’s bridges, are considered structurally deficient, meaning they are in “poor” condition.
Anyway, who wants more ‘lethal aid’?
i was like “a bridge collapsed in TN?” This article is from 2019 so that makes sense why I didnt remember this.
Also for that particular bridge
The collapse of a concrete beam from a bridge in Chattanooga, Tennessee was likely caused when a vehicle carrying an oversized load hit the bottom of the bridge, a state transportation official said Tuesday.
The vehicle went under the bridge and sliced through some of the steel reinforcement strands in the exterior beam, Paul Degges, the department’s chief engineer, told reporters. A concrete rail helped support the damaged beam but ultimately it collapsed, he said.
Guess it’s good Biden got an infrastructure deal passed, I’m pretty sure Trump failed on that one. I know the Biden one is fixing a very old bridge near me. And the next one will actually have pedestrian crossings instead of a glorified curb to walk on. The new bridge will connect two communities instead of severing them. Fucking finally.
In this specific case, is it reasonable to expect any bridge to survive getting hit by a massive container ship? Would a “sufficient” bridge have at least held together long enough for people to escape?
Apparently there the answer is to either put the pylons in shallow enough water that big ships physically cannot reach them, or to create artificial reefs around them so that big ships physically cannot reach them. This particular bridge seems to have been uncommonly vulnerable compared to similarly large bridges over shipping lanes, because the closest supports to the channel where big ships can fit were closer together than is normal and they lacked any sort of artificial reef barrier, even though the water depth near them would have allowed barriers to be built.
Yeah that makes a lot of sense. “Just don’t get hit” but unironically.
By harnessing American ingenuity and eliminating the regulatory barriers to modernization, we can solve this problem the same way we solved poverty, inflation, and unemployment: if you vote hard enough in November, we can come together to change the metrics by which structural deficiency is measured.
At least we aren’t some shit hole third world co- oh my God!
in America you can’t even have bridges anymore, because of Woke
maintaining bridges is too advanced for capitalism
We’re gonna need more container ships for those 47,000 bridges
I wonder how many bridges are like this in China or other AES countries 🤔
there’s more than 47,000 bridges in amerikkka
