Comments on Bridge Collapse Caught on Security Camera

Take a good look because that's a preview of our own viaduct.

Eat my fuck, monkey, it is not.

The woman walking by on her cell phone kinda freaked me out.

"Mm-hm. Yeah? No, I'll be there on time, don't worry. Oh, that, that was just the bridge collapsing... What? Oh, probably this weekend..."

You gonna eat all that fuck?

Fnarf, yeah it was monkey baiting, sure. But how can you stand by your claim that there could not be a similar fate of the viaduct, as far as breaking, causing deaths, etc.?

This could happen to ANY bridge in the West Coast if we get a large enough seismic event, and Seattle is in the Rim Of Fire. Come on.

Jesus, now I'm going to drive around the lake today instead of taking 90.

I'm hungry for some fuck. Share the fuck, monkey!

I loved the Fear footage from Decline. "Eat my fuck, we're from Frisco!!"

Well, I did have fuck for lunch yesterday but I suppose I could have it again today.

Mr. Poe, there's plenty of fnarf fuck for everyone.

Fnarf, I realize that my statement might (MIGHT) be an overstatement (actually, after reading your comments in the other post about MN) so let me rephrase... take a good look because that's a preview of the 520 bridge.

There, how's that? Do I still have to eat your fuck?

You know, if we're gonna full-out fear-monger about local highways, that bridge looks an awful lot like the I-5 Canal Bridge, and the Aurora Bridge.

Also, anyone who has seen the spindly pillar supports under I-5 around Eastlake would also feel very apprehensive about ever getting on I-5 near Downtown again.

There's no way our viaduct or the 520 will fall...unless Mothman appears or Richard Gere.

99 WILL DIE, DENVER 9
99 WILL DIE, DENVER 9
99 WILL DIE, DENVER 9
99 WILL DIE, DENVER 9
99 WILL DIE, DENVER 9
99 WILL DIE, DENVER 9
99 WILL DIE, DENVER 9
99 WILL DIE, DENVER 9

Mothman FTW!

You know, I never noticed this before, but "Rim of Fire" sounds really dirty.

Also, isn't it "Ring of Fire"?

wondering - 12th Ave. bridge to Beacon Hill ... easily forgotten, deep ravine, old bridge ...

Have always found the I-5 back from the U Dist. to be a bit scary ... don't really know why ... just a few moment of well, what about this ... feelings.

God, what a horrible event ... and yes, infrastructure costs money ... wake up fat headed R's.

Seeing this footage actually makes me feel better. I mean its horrifying, but not even 10 people died. That is pretty damn good. Not to diminish the the people who did die, but when you see it you would think there is no way the people on the bridge would be alive.

It makes me feel glad that when 520 does collapse during rush hour, I have a pretty high probability of survival. And I think it will happen even if Mothman never shows. ;)

I trust the Aurora Bridge. Anything built before WW2 was built when constructors cared more about permanence than planned obsolescence. And I doubt that the Ship Canal bridge is actually the same design as the I35-W bridge was. However, the AWV is the same design as the Cypress Street Viaduct in Oakland so that better give all the "AWV won't collapse" people pause.

@ 16, there are plenty of people missing and cars still under the water. A lot more than 10 people died.

Oops, 16 was joking. I need to read the whole comment...

520 scares me the most for sure.

Actually, Matt from Denver, it's not. The two decks of the Cypress Viaduct were poured separately and assembled/stacked together. By way of contrast. the concrete for each section of the AWV was poured straight from top to bottom, so each segment is a solid structure - and each segment is linked by an expansion joint designed to allow the structure to flex along its length (which is why most of the AWV was unaffected by the Nisqually Quake - and only the section by Washington Street has settled about 6" or whatever it is since then). If the AWV were to catastrophically fail, it woud be due to individual segments topplling over in an earthquake as the soil underneath them liquified rather than pancaking along its length as the Cypress Fwy did (not a pleasant scenario, but significantly different)

Look at the collapse in Minn. - it all went down because it was essentially all one piece. A very different situation, indeed.

And I echo the poster above - while the loss of life is tragic, and more bodies will doubtless be found, the overall death toll seems surprisingly low to me given the nature of the route and amount of traffic that was on it when it collapsed.

Not that that will stop fearmongerers with other agendas, however.

i just worry about these bridges fallin down and me surviving by having to drink pee for three days..
didn't that happen when that freeway collapsed in oakland ?

@17: Pre-WWII bridges have collapsed. Besides the original Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the most famous example is probably the Silver Bridge on the Ohio/West Virginia border:
http://www.corrosion-doctors.org/Bridges/Silver-Bridge.htm

There's some truth to what you say, in that bridges built in those days were often very conservatively constructed, with lots of extra load paths. Engineers didn't fully understand all the stresses involved, so they included generous safety factors to make up for the unknown. Unfortunately, they also didn't understand fatigue cracking and stress corrosion cracking, nor did they anticipate the huge increases in traffic volume and vehicle weight that have happened since WWII. Much of the steel made pre-WWII also becomes quite brittle in cold temperatures, due to a high carbon content, compounding the problem. (This problem didn't receive much attention until a WWII Liberty tanker broke completely in half *at the dock* due to a brittle fracture of the steel.)

Fucking vomit. Fnarf fuck tastes like shit.

It's too bad we're only paying 40 percent for the 520 bridge replacement, cause that could happen ... TODAY ... to it.

@23: Dude, the Silver Bridge collapse was totally due to Mothman. Mothman's never been seen in Seattle, so we should be OK.

On that note, why doesn't Seattle have a Mothman? We've got no scary monster to be afraid of other than the viaduct itself. Lame for us.

@26 Bigfoot is a local!

Mr. Poe, I have a bad diet.

It's nice to see all the engineers here who are able to tell which bridges are going to fall down just by thinking about them.

I'm going to guess that they're going to find out something about the repair work that was being done on that MN bridge that either weakened or overstressed the joints of the middle section. That middle bit just plain broke off and dropped, almost intact, to the water.

And for the record, LOTS of pre-WWII bridges have collapsed, and in fact post-WWII bridges are much more securely designed, if perhaps less picturesquely, than earlier ones. Check out the Quebec Bridge over the St. Lawrence, which collapsed TWICE during construction, in 1907 and 1916, with much heavier loss of life than yesterday. Or the Tay Bridge in 1879. Or the Ashtabula Bridge in 1876.

@monkey and all the d-bags, when you're stuck under concrete and twisted metal I hope nobody gets to you in time. Cheers!

You know, now I'm totally going to watch Mothman Prophecies again tonight.

@21 is right... We shouldn't expect the AWV to pancake here. Of course, I'm not sure I want to be on it if a section tips over into the buildings next to it either.

Oooh, look, everyone....Fnarf can look things up in wikipedia!

(For the record: "rim of fire" is the morning-after consequence of a big bowl of Fnarf fuck.)

I feel bad playing the fear-monger in general, but this must be said: It must be noted that if 520 were to collapse, the death toll would probably be higher than 10 people: this I-35W bridge was only maybe a couple thousand feet across a river (you could see the whole span in one wide-angle camera shot), plus was under construction and had reduced traffic, whereas the 520 bridge is something like a mile long across an entire lake and is packed to the gills in at least one direction during rush hour, often other times.

This conversation has strayed too far from the topic at hand: Mothman brought down the bridge.

For all the pre WW2 bridges that have collapsed, let me point out that they were not old, time-tested bridges like Aurora. That's not to say that it will last forever but if an earthquake strikes the next time I'm in Seattle and fate puts me on a bridge when it happens, I know my chances are a lot better on Aurora.

@ 21, thanks for the clarification. Nonetheless as you acknowledge there are lots of similarities, and probably the most important one is that they're both built on fill which is the critical factor. I don't believe it's fearmongering to look at the Minnesota disaster to remind people in Seattle (and every place with aging bridges and infrastructure) that something needs to be done about the AWV and that the AWV needs to come down via demolition rather than an act of god. And yes, the same goes for the 520.

Last night I was talking to this little voice coming out of my bathroom sink...he said his name was Indrid Cold. He said: Don't watch Autumn in New York with Richard Gere.

A Non Imus: in fact, I just got finished reading five books on bridge construction the other day, which had pictures of the Tay and Quebec disasters. I did hit Wikipedia up for the exact dates, as the library books have been returned.

Gomez: this Minnesota bridge is a major crossing between two large cities (St. Paul and Minneapolis, and it was rush hour, and the bridge was bumper to bumper.

I'm shocked that Slog commenters would comment on stuff they don't know anything about. Shocked, I tell you.

@37, the bridge was a crossing from Minneapolis to Minneapolis, 35W doesn't go to St. Paul.

That woman in the video was freakin' hot!!!!!

Well, crap, I thought the river was the boundary. Where is it, then?

@38, 35W is still the span every western suburbanite has to cross in order to get to work in the city from their homes. I certainly never thought twice about the safety of that bridge when I was crossing it two or three times a day... Like everything else in the Midwest it seemed pretty stable. The viaduct and 520 on the other hand... I set up my life so I don't have to cross those deathtraps.

Ever been on the huge I-5 bridge over the ship canal in heavy traffic when the whole thing is shaking heavily because of the big trucks. Stuck on the bridge in the middle traffic and I feel like crying or something.

37. You missed the point. At any one moment in time, like say, when the bridge suddenly collapses during rush hour, there are far more vehicles at a particular moment on 520 than on that I-35W span due to its length and size. What I'm saying is that, were 520 to collapse... far, far more people would be directly involved in the catastrophe.

@ 35

Victor Gray - the former head Washington State highway engineer - thinks retrofitting the AWV is both feasible and a lot cheaper than the other options under consideration. Problem is - fewer people get rich that way. WSDOT overstates the cost of retrofitting it because it has been planning a toll tunnel in this location since the early 1990's, and because here is a lot of political pressure to do so.

@28: The Quebec Bridge collapse is especially amusing to read about because the chain of events that lead up to it is so clear. The design was changed repeatedly, but the loads were never recalculated. Reading about it now, it's like one of those horror films where everyone except the protagonist can see what's coming.

@35: The Silver Bridge was nearly 40 years old when it fell -- about the age that many I-5 spans, including the Spokane Street Bridge, are now. How time-tested does something have to be before you feel it's safe? What if it was built to carry Model T Fords and it's now carrying Peterbilts -- does that change your opinion?

@42: All bridges flex somewhat under traffic. That, in itself, is not a problem (although it can be unsettling.) I've been on rail trusses that had deflections you could have measured in *inches* when a train crossed them. It's when it stops springing back that you're in trouble. ;)

@ 45, go way back to my first post and you'll see the difference I perceive between the Aurora Bridge and what was built in the 60s. And there were big rig trucks in the 30s that undoubtedly crossed that bridge routinely then since hwy 99 was the major N-S route on the west coast before I-5 was built. Yeah, unless someone has something better than "it looks like 35W" then I'd advise them to keep it to themselves.

I just want to point out that when I first moved out here, I was struck by the fact that crossing the Ship Canal bridge felt *just* like crossing the I-35W bridge northbound. You looked down and saw water far below you (ship canal/Mississippi) and then looked right and saw a big university on the far bank (UW/UofM). I know they are totally different bridges and all, but I will never ever cross the I-5 Canal bridge again without worrying about falling 165ft to my doom.

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