It was not thunder

September 6, 2018 10:06 AM

A detailed examination of the Genoa bridge collapse disaster.
posted by Chrysostom (13 comments total)

The drone video at the top of that article is horrifying; it's a wonder there weren't more deaths. Sounds like there will be a lot of finger-pointing and buck-passing for years in the investigation, and that there is plenty of blame to share.
posted by TedW at 10:32 AM on September 6, 2018 [3 favorites]

Looks like bridge maintenance was the responsibility of a private for-profit management firm. Details beyond that are secondary.
posted by rocket88 at 11:01 AM on September 6, 2018 [8 favorites]

Don't worry, I'm sure they won't spend years blaming the wrong people.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 11:05 AM on September 6, 2018 [2 favorites]

Privitizing public infrastructure doesn't work. And now it has a highly visible body count.
posted by SansPoint at 11:09 AM on September 6, 2018 [10 favorites]

Holy shit apartment buildings under the damn bridge.
posted by ardgedee at 11:19 AM on September 6, 2018 [4 favorites]

Italy's crumbling infrastructure under scrutiny after bridge collapse

(TL;DR... it's The Mafia)
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 11:47 AM on September 6, 2018 [2 favorites]

That whole story is almost identical to the 35W bridge collapse in Minneapolis. Bridge built in the '60s, check. TPTB don't want to pay to replace the bridge because it'd be "too expensive", check. Insufficient repairs and patches, check. Inspections that revealed a dangerous amount of degradation, but nobody did anything about it, check. Bridge finally collapses in the middle of rush hour and kills people, check.

I don't know what it is that convinces people that you don't have to put money and hours into maintaining your infrastructure, but boy, that attitude is pervasive.
posted by Autumnheart at 11:47 AM on September 6, 2018 [13 favorites]

Wow, that was an exceptional piece. The drone videos at the beginning and end had my stomach in my shoes. Tragic, horrifying, preventable.
posted by arcticwoman at 11:48 AM on September 6, 2018

As a designer, I really enjoyed how the layout and functionality of the page contributed to the progression of the story. A+ presentation.
posted by Autumnheart at 11:49 AM on September 6, 2018 [9 favorites]

Yeah, long-form reports like this keep me coming back to the tier-1 newspapers.

It's one thing to be surprised by a design failure. It's another to see it coming for decades (including by the designer himself!), and not raise the money passion and courage to prevent it. It's a failure of human nature.

I hope someone writes a report as wide ranging as Feynman's Rogers Commission Report into the Challenger shuttle disaster which described failures in safety culture, as well as technical mistakes. If they do write such a report, I hope that we all give it sober self reflection, and that we get better. I can hope.
posted by Popular Ethics at 12:19 PM on September 6, 2018 [3 favorites]

Big infrastructure showpieces are attractive and front-page material. Maintenance is not, unless the article is about traffic jams caused by road closures. Maintenance doesn't sell, alas...
posted by I claim sanctuary at 10:18 PM on September 6, 2018 [1 favorite]

Popular Ethics, if you want another example of such a report (which actually cites the Rogers Commission report and the subsequent report into the loss of Columbia) then look at the Haddon-Cave Report into the loss of a Royal Air Force Nimrod over Afghanistan.

I also can also very highly recommend Mario Salvadori's classic Why Buildings Fall Down.
posted by Major Clanger at 2:12 AM on September 7, 2018 [1 favorite]

I can't help but compare this to the Forth Road Bridge, which is near me and of similar design and age. Problems with the Forth Road Bridge were known and repairs deferred due to cost until eventually a part snapped; issues with using private contractors for maintainence have been raised. However, at the same time there were very significant differences; including that it seems that the bridge had much more regular inspection than that of the one in Genoa (though this is not entirely clear) which allowed that snapped part to be found and the bridge closed. The bridge in Genoa had acoustic tests once - the Forth Bridge has had permanent, continuous acoustic monitoring since 2006, and it seems that most (all?) the large suspension bridges across the UK do. It seems very much that there is a clear standard for maintaining 1960s suspension bridges, and this was ignored.
posted by Vortisaur at 11:41 AM on September 8, 2018 [1 favorite]