Another Engineer warning turned down... and people dies.

[station240]

You need zero qualifications to be a manager or politician. Any background will do.

At some point engineers need to stop being the fall guy for these large failures- where the engineers were starved of time, money, resources to do a good job, and the bridge comes crashing down.

Exactly the problem in this case, the politicians in charge have zero qualifications for what they are in charge for. Not an issue if they actually listen to actual experts (as opposed to fake ones employed as consultant 'yes men')
A bricklayer could do a better job.

Now if the laws were written justly, the politican who refuse to pay for a new bridge would be in Jail right now, and rightly so.
If an engineer declares a bridge to be at the end of it's life and unstafe, the money for a replacement should be automatically robbed from the budget. To hell with waiting months/years for politicians to decide.

[Kjelt]

You need zero qualifications to be a manager or politician. Any background will do.

At some point engineers need to stop being the fall guy for these large failures- where the engineers were starved of time, money, resources to do a good job, and the bridge comes crashing down.

Exactly the problem in this case, the politicians in charge have zero qualifications for what they are in charge for. Not an issue if they actually listen to actual experts (as opposed to fake ones employed as consultant 'yes men')
A bricklayer could do a better job.

Now if the laws were written justly, the politican who refuse to pay for a new bridge would be in Jail right now, and rightly so.
If an engineer declares a bridge to be at the end of it's life and unstafe, the money for a replacement should be automatically robbed from the budget. To hell with waiting months/years for politicians to decide.

Perhaps you should get the facts straight.
What I read today is that They have outsourced the maintenance of roads and bridges incl this one to a private organisation over ten years ago that gets funding from public tollways raising billions of euros each year.
That company is now under investigation if they invested that money in the roads/bridges or used it to grow (mergers and takeovers). The company is owned by the Benneton family. The company claims to have done all inspections and found no shortcomings. So this is going to be an interesting case for the investigators and I hope they turn everything up and down to find the thruth.

[Zucca]

To me it's clear that an engineer did not his job properly.
I posted here just because I think as engineers sometime we forgot how important our role in the society is and how devastating could be our mistakes.

That bridge reminds me I have to do my job well.

I didn't want to speculate or to lack in respect, nor to compare NASA with a bridge.

[In Vacuo Veritas]

To me it's clear that an engineer did not his job properly.
I posted here just because I think as engineers sometime we forgot how important our role in the society is and how devastating could be our mistakes.

That bridge reminds me I have to do my job well.

I didn't want to speculate or to lack in respect, nor to compare NASA with a bridge.

Engineers are almost powerless in the real world. Don't you think the engineers made the right design for the bridge? How can the engineer control how the materials will be replaced with inferior ones when the system is corrupt?

[langwadt]

To me it's clear that an engineer did not his job properly.
I posted here just because I think as engineers sometime we forgot how important our role in the society is and how devastating could be our mistakes.

That bridge reminds me I have to do my job well.

I didn't want to speculate or to lack in respect, nor to compare NASA with a bridge.

IEEE code of ethics

https://www.ieee.org/about/corporate/governance/p7-8.html

[ignator]

Quote from: langwadt on Today at 10:32:27 am>
IEEE code of ethics

https://www.ieee.org/about/corporate/governance/p7-8.html

But these are not EEs, but CEs that design structures. They may have a code of ethics, but in the end they are boxed in by their employer, and in this case it is a government.
A bigger issue is this is all government run, and as other posters have stated politicians are not qualified to do anything.
There are photos showing the state of disrepair.


It will be easy to blame the subcontractor that was maintaining this bridge, but they were not paid to rebuild the bridge from the ground up, and it's looking that was the problem with 60 years of aging. I know this failure is not the only one from infrastructure rot, and it will not be the last one. And it's not limited to any country.

[floobydust]

They are looking at blaming the Morandi bridge failure on bad engineering, that one tendon failure would cause a collapse. There was no redundancy and it used rods instead of cables.

It would be best - the politicians, maintenance company, all absolved /s

Autostrade per l'Italia toll revenue is € 796m last quarter, leaving  € 539m gross profit. Sound like a cash cow to me at € 8.4m/day tolls.

[raptor1956]

If you drive over and around the bridge using Google Maps you can see that most of the north side of the bridge was being worked on or looked like it.  Also interesting is the fact that the cable stays were boxed with a rectangular covering but on one section of the bridge the box is removed and the cables visible.  Also noteworthy is that I did not see a single worker working on it.


Brian

[floobydust]

There's a good chance the maintenance crew made a mistake.

I'm curious if the rain storm aggravated the failure. Politician: "it was struck by lightning!" 

Remember the Tacoma Narrows bridge 1940 collapse. All engineer's iron rings are apparently made of that steel, so we are cloaked in failure lol.

It was a resonance in the structure excited by vortex shedding. Q was high with equal-spaced pylons, the structure oscillated and collapsed. This Morani bridge might have been wobbling.

[Nusa]

There are a lot of bridges in the world, and failures of various types happen regularly. This one is just the news of the moment, and will fade from the world news fairly quickly, just like all the others. It'll be local news much longer, since the cleanup/replacement/infrastructure issues are in plain sight.

Here's a list that already includes this latest incident:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bridge_failures

[Paul Moir]

Remember the Tacoma Narrows bridge 1940 collapse. All engineer's iron rings are apparently made of that steel, so we are cloaked in failure lol.

No, that was the Quebec Bridge:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebec_Bridge   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Ring

[ignator]

Quote from: floobydust on Today at 05:05:24 pm

Remember the Tacoma Narrows bridge 1940 collapse. All engineer's iron rings are apparently made of that steel, so we are cloaked in failure lol.

It was a resonance in the structure excited by vortex shedding. Q was high with equal-spaced pylons, the structure oscillated and collapsed. This Morani bridge might have been wobbling.


A documentary on this bridge indicated that at the time, architects were in a design 'competition' to make bridge support and decking to be as thin as possible. This prevented rigidity to wind load. As well made an airfoil, all this enabled it to go into oscillation.
If you look at any failure analysis, after the catastrophic event occurred, you find a fault scenario that was not thought of. Or the fault was assumed to be remote in possibility.
In this case, the obvious failure of concrete, that does not last forever.

[KL27x]

Exactly the problem in this case, the politicians in charge have zero qualifications for what they are in charge for. Not an issue if they actually listen to actual experts (as opposed to fake ones employed as consultant 'yes men')

To overgeneralize, good engineers are not necessarily good salespeople. The guy that is more persuasive is often the guy who the decision maker is going to listen to. A competent engineer can explain things to a very successful businessman/politician, and in some cases they might as well be talking to a wall. No matter how many times you tell them they can't do it this way, no matter how much details you go into the why, it doesn't matter. If there's a credible and persuasive guy that says "Yeah, no problem; done in a week," they will believe it. There's nothing the engineer can do beyond that.

i see this over and over. Be afraid of the company that says "yes, no problem" to everything you ask. Empty promises are easy to make, and money changed hands is difficult to get back.

 

[floobydust]

Corporations value profit above all else, not safety. Though you will get written up for not wearing a hard hat 

I've walked out of a few jobs where I was pushed to fake/ignore safety on products in order to get them to market ASAP.

I've had engineering managers that are PhD's, MSc's, P.Eng's, tech's, and nobodies other than being with a company for say 15 years  ground up, from ditch digger to CEO.
Their values are mostly about getting that bonus, pleasing the exec, not spending money, pushing the schedule etc.

Anyone can be an "engineering manager" and when I butt heads against "doing it right" verses "maximum profit as quickly as possible", I haven't found a way to not cause a shitstorm. If anyone has an option, love to hear it.

[Kjelt]

Corporations value profit above all else, not safety. Though you will get written up for not wearing a hard hat 

If a safety issue was ignored by a company they should not only financially penalize them, they should personally hold those people accountable and put them in jail.
That is the only way you can hold organisations responsible by hurting the people themselves.

Now if an engineer reports such a safety violation to his supervisor make it official. Sent an email and keep the copy. If the supervisor does not respond sent it again. Don't take a non official response as an answer (like he walks in and tells you to ignore it). Ask for an email or written response.
That way you have done what you could unless it is so serious it is a public hazzard, in that case you might want to leak it to the press and start finding a new job. This is more easily said than done, in many companies there is still a "stay in line or get out" mentality even on these issues and till now most whistleblowers get an unfair treatment ending their careers because other companies also don't want to hire them. This should change asap IMO. If you work for a company you ARE the company and each employee is responsible just as much as it was a one man organization.

[Kjelt]

I just saw this in the newspaper 
It seems it is not an isolated incident but more a structural collapse of badly maintained infrastructure throughout the country.

[Paul Moir]

If a safety issue was ignored by a company they should not only financially penalize them, they should personally hold those people accountable and put them in jail.
That is the only way you can hold organisations responsible by hurting the people themselves.

In Canada it works that way due to a mining disaster:  https://www.ccohs.ca/oshanswers/legisl/billc45.html   I remember that a few months ago this was used to convict those responsible in a case where an unguarded conveyor belt led to a horrific death.

[mcinque]

I just saw this in the newspaper 
It seems it is not an isolated incident but more a structural collapse of badly maintained infrastructure throughout the country.

It is just speculation. We're not civil engineers here. And noone should correlate just 2 data and reach a conclusion.

Even without a degree in civil engineering it's clear that picture did not take in consideration many tecnical aspects:
- the size of the bridges
- the type of the bridges (girder, cantilever, suspended, arch, cable-stayed etc.)
- the construction material of the bridges (steel, concrete etc.)
- how many earthquakes have occurred over the years where the bridges are placed and how much energy the bridges received
- the year of construction of the involved bridges (to relate the badly manteinance to aging)
- how many bridges we have in the country that are still in place (to understand if there is huge issue or just single events)
- who is responsible for maintenance of the bridges (to understand if there is a common cause, not all bridges are inspected by government representatives)
- how much bridges collapse in the rest of the world (to compare accidents)
- and probably many other things that, without at least a degree in civil engineering, we are not considering.

So journalists and newspapers should just tell what happened and not provide any data to force people to reach a conclusion, which should be left only to the experts in the field.

[floobydust]

Call in the engineers! After the collapse, now the politicians and media are willing to listen.
Failing after 51 years, it would be very hard to blame the engineering.  Mr. Rust is probably at fault.

"A jumble of public, private, local, regional and national agencies operate and maintain the country’s highways, bridges, viaducts and tunnels with little oversight — a system so fragmented that it is sometimes unclear who is responsible for a tract of road or a bridge. "

"This is a general problem in Italy,” said Andrea Del Grosso, a professor emeritus in engineering at the University of Genoa. “It’s always hard to make decisions, so projects drag on for decades, costs inflate, and when they decide to do them, it’s usually too late.” NYT article


Italy has massive government debt #4 in the world below Greece, Japan, Lebanon.
Don't really have money to replace the old bridges.

[Mr. Scram]

Call in the engineers! After the collapse, now the politicians and media are willing to listen.
Failing after 51 years, it would be very hard to blame the engineering.  Mr. Rust is probably at fault.

"A jumble of public, private, local, regional and national agencies operate and maintain the country’s highways, bridges, viaducts and tunnels with little oversight — a system so fragmented that it is sometimes unclear who is responsible for a tract of road or a bridge. "

"This is a general problem in Italy,” said Andrea Del Grosso, a professor emeritus in engineering at the University of Genoa. “It’s always hard to make decisions, so projects drag on for decades, costs inflate, and when they decide to do them, it’s usually too late.” NYT article

Italy has massive government debt #4 in the world below Greece, Japan, Lebanon.
Don't really have money to replace the old bridges.

Autostrada is the company owning and maintaining the toll highway network. A quick check shows that Autostrada profit hovers around a billion euro a year. This isn't a matter of not having the money. It seems to be matter of maximizing profits too much. I understand that a billion euro evaporates quickly when large civil engineering projects are involved, but there certainly is cash at hand.

[KL27x]

Italy has massive government debt #4 in the world below Greece, Japan, Lebanon.

USA: Hold my beer.

[floobydust]

Autostrada is the company owning and maintaining the toll highway network. A quick check shows that Autostrada profit hovers around a billion euro a year. This isn't a matter of not having the money. It seems to be matter of maximizing profits too much. I understand that a billion euro evaporates quickly when large civil engineering projects are involved, but there certainly is cash at hand.

Autostrade 2017 financials 2017 Group’s net debt at 31 December 2017 totals €9,351m

Wow, almost €10 billion in debt? That's some kind of money shell game. Caviar for the Benettons is expensive.

[Eka]

Now if an engineer reports such a safety violation to his supervisor make it official. Sent an email and keep the copy. If the supervisor does not respond sent it again. Don't take a non official response as an answer (like he walks in and tells you to ignore it). Ask for an email or written response.

You write it in ink into your own personal bound engineering journal where you keep all your notes of what you did, etc. I have my own journals of what I was doing, results, etc going back to the '70s, and I'm not even an engineer. I just have some as mentors back then. They got me in the habit. They also provided excellent notes for how I took various photographs. Make sure you sign and date the pages. The journals should be a bound notebook with the pages sewn in. Being bound, written in ink, dated and signed makes it legally admissible evidence in US courts, and likely many other countries. Entering notes of all you do, calls you make, topics of conversations with whom, notes about correspondence, topics of that correspondence, shopping lists for the SO, etc makes is very hard to call into question the veracity engineering notebooks.

[Kjelt]

Wow that is very thorough documentation. I wonder what field of work you were in.

[TassiloH]

If you drive over and around the bridge using Google Maps you can see that most of the north side of the bridge was being worked on or looked like it.  Also interesting is the fact that the cable stays were boxed with a rectangular covering but on one section of the bridge the box is removed and the cables visible.  Also noteworthy is that I did not see a single worker working on it.

That is not a removed covering, but these are additional cables that were added during a renovation in the 1990s. The original cables are cast into concrete, not removable.
If one is interested on how these bridges were built, there is a nice video (in German though) about the construction of a bridge in Venzuela (Maracaibo) 1959 which has an almost 100% identical design, except that the cables are not cast into concrete. http://www.bauforum24.tv/bilfinger-berger-maracaibo-bruecke-1962-121/