Engineering is hard, and it isn't PC. Reality doesn't care about your victim creds, it only cares if you get the math right. Officials find probable cause in FIU pedestrian bridge collapse
The image to the right is from shortly after the collapse. It is from Wikimedia Commons, provided by the National Transportation Safety Board.
According to the report, errors in the designs and bridge plans by Tallahassee-based FIGG Bridge Engineers were not detected. A thorough independent peer review should have been done on the bridge, but it never happened.
Contributing to the collapse was the inadequate peer review performed by the firm Louis Berger U.S., Inc, which failed to detect the calculation errors in the bridge design.
It seems the firm hired to do the peer review was not licensed to do one. They fibbed when then applied for the contract.
So two engineering firms got the calculations wrong. The bridge collapsed killing six and injuring ten more. I guess it's true that Math Is Hard.
You can find my previous posts on the subject at this link. There you will find an engineering discussion of the bridge, dashcam video of the collapse, and more.
Structural Engineer here. As I recall THE ALL FEMALE team was the big kadooky here. And so dang proud of that little point. Result? Math in fact is hard and when you get it wrong = lots of times people die. So much for hiring by gender.
ReplyDeleteMy biggest problem with the FIU bridge is that it cost more than 10 million dollars. You could have built a bridge that size, that would support a locomotive, and a fully loaded train for less than $500,000. But it wouldn't have been a monument to whatever. And there was a federal grant, so why not spend money needlessly.
DeleteWhich might have been alright if you hired a real engineering firm, but there were 2 who both apparently didn't bother about that pesky math.
Every engineer should be required to read about the Tay Bridge Disaster and write a report proving that they understand the cause. Then, when something like this happens, that report can be entered in evidence as proof of criminal negligence.
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