35W Bridge just Collapsed

[Enes]

IT IS SO SAD that politics use such an event to push their shameless agenda....

SHAME ON HIM!

[Kracka]

n/m

[Enes]

he is such a puppet, so thats why its easy to hate on him.

[DoughtCom]

I'm glad I take the exit right before it since I work on Washington.... would have pissed me off if my Evo ended up in the river.

I'm glad the death count isn't higher (yet) it's really tragic. I hope everyone on here and everyone they know is ok, it's a damn shame it happened.

According to my architect friend, whenever you work on a bridge you close it. Taking pieces of the concrete out can either knock something loose on the supporting beams and or mess with the structural integrity since the 1 piece slabs are what help keep it stable.

[scheides]

I think Dick Chaney shot the bridge, and that's why it fell.

[niterydr]

Thoughts and prayers go out to the family. I wish all the sideline engineers and theorists would shut the fuck up and think of the positives.

1)Traffic was low in physical count at that time.
2)Traffic wasn't moving along at 55mph, thankfully there WAS construction on the bridge to divert/clog traffic flow to other major routes.
3)The amount of civilians that responded was simply amazing. There are dozens upon dozens of reports of people in street clothes helping out rescue crews for up to the first hour of rescue operations.

Yes there was a construciton crew on it, yes they were doing resurfacing. Yes the bridge was found to be in "minimal operating standards", there were cracks, but no-one thought it was due for repairs until the year 2020.

Let the facts come out first before everyone starts theories, there will be plenty of time to debate about this accident (not incident) for the time to come. Lets just hope they find some of the remaining 20 missing people alive.

[scheides]

Here's a very very very very good page filled with info about this whole thing:

http://pages.e-democracy.org/35W

[tpunx99GSX]

It looks like from the video of this, the side that the train was moving under was the first side to go, the vibrations from the train moving could have resonated the bridge enough to stress the weakest points of the bridge.
mythbusters did a story about the resonate frequency of structures. They used a vibration exciter to bring down a building by using it at the resonate frequency of the structure. My theory is that the train just happened to resonate the bridge at its frequency.
Either way my thoughts and prayers to the familys of the people who are still missing.

[MATCHBX]

CNN.com actually has the security cam footage of the bridge falling. Pretty eerey stuff. One of our friends was driving under the bridge about 30 minutes before it fell and said that he had dodge chunks of cement that were on the ground. Hopefully they find the last worker alive. The company that was working on it is one of my customers and one of my co-workers is friends with one of the workers. We still hold out hope that there will be good news coming out of it.

[Halon]

I wish all the sideline engineers and theorists would shut the fuck up

x2

And one of my Japanese friends in Okinawa just wrote me an email asking if I was ok. Apparently the whole world knows about our bridge now.