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Sounds miserably similar to this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_International_Universi...

Though the FIU one collapsed within a week of the fatally flawed span first being installed.




That was due to a design calculation error, not some aesthetic concern.


No, it was due to a really lame attempt to make something that looked like a cable-stayed bridge but wasn't.

Here's the bridge in Norway, before collapse.[1] That is something that should never have been made of wood.

[1] https://static.dezeen.com/uploads/2022/08/tretten-bridge-nor...


Nor of any other material. Between the insanely shallow truss depth at the right end of it, and the "can't tell compression from tension" decision to slant all the diagonal members in the same direction - that bridge is a poster child for "I Flunked Engineering 201".


I almost feel like intuition tells you that. It literally looks like it can fold down flat. A regular truss bridge looks like a honeycomb, straining, but balanced.


It just looks so wrong that the cross members don't switch direction in the middle. I can't even look at that bridge without getting creeped out.


that's a pretty political spin. if i remember correctly the bridge in florida was entirely feasible but they got the pre-tensioning and assembly wrong.


The NTSB found that it was actually that the 11/12 node region was too weak as designed, an error that wasn't caught by the reviewer.


> The new pedestrian bridge was designed to connect the campus to student housing in a dramatic, sculptural way and also to showcase the school's leadership in the ABC method of rapid bridge construction.[16][17]

And from my recollection of coverage at the time - FIU's administrative pressure to deliver their dramatic & leading-edge-construction bridge, quick and cheap, lead to all sorts of corner cutting in the engineering & fabrication.


To me the root cause was they just could not see a way to inconvenience even one single driver ever. They had to grade separate pedestrians from cars over a freeway and a gigantic parking lot. Universities should be pedestrian focused.

The bridge could have been designed correctly. But the fundamental issue was the bridge didn't need to exist.


I think that's more of an auxiliary issue than the "fundamental" one. Space is limited, and a nice (and non-collapsing) bridge could be more convenient for pedestrians than however things would be laid out on the ground even if there wasn't a road there. Safe bridges should be able to exist, whether one would have been needed in this exact spot in an alternate reality or not.

It's also very telling for you to condense "a freeway and a gigantic parking lot" down to "one single driver ever." Five motorists wouldn't have been killed by the collapse alone if "one single driver" was the only one who ever used it.


[flagged]



Your Tampa Bay article does nothing to refute the claim that the bridge was designed by an all female team. All it does is state that men also worked at both companies and were also in leadership roles therefore it couldn't have been led by an all-female team. As though the companies were so small every employee was involved in every project.

If this is the best evidence you have it's not very good. And snopes is a laughably unreliable source I won't even entertain their bullshit.


Typically you would refute evidence with other evidence.


What on earth are you talking about? The engineer of record for the project was a man. And I don't understand the implication of your comment – do you really believe that not only was the engineering team led by women, but they also refused to collaborate with men in any capacity? The project had to be approved by a PE at some point, do you think that a female PE is somehow less capable than a male one?


The female engineer angle was never true, it was a 4chan hallucination. Something they lied to each other so much they forgot it was a lie

Look up the phone call / voicemail between FIGG engineer and FDOT, in which the FIGG engineer describes the cracking and says it isn't a problem and they're proceeding. The engineer was a man.


William "Denny" Pate was the engineer who stamped the drawings. After the incident he says his wife accidentally put his phone through the laundry, so he couldn't provide his texts for evidence. Hmmmmmm.

https://www.enr.com/articles/47108-bridge-designer-testifies...




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