Miami – An engineering professor says the decision to use what the builders called an “innovative installation” for a Florida pedestrian bridge that collapsed was risky.
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Robert Bea of the University of California, Berkeley, says it’s too early to know exactly what happened in the collapse Thursday on the campus of at Florida International University in the Miami area.
But he questions the builders’ decision to try a “rapid span installation” where the 174-foot-long (55-meter-long) span was prefabricated, then swung into place before its central support tower was built. The section was put into place across a busy eight-lane road Saturday.
Bea said trying something new that crossed a highway was a gamble.
The bridge was intended to provide a walkway over the busy street where an 18-year-old female FIU student from San Diego was killed while trying to cross last August, according to local media reports.
Students at FIU are currently on their spring break vacation, which runs from March 12 to March 17.
To keep the inevitable disruption of traffic associated with bridge construction to a minimum, the 174-foot portion of the bridge was built adjacent to Southwest 8th Street using a method called Accelerated Bridge Construction (ABC). It was driven into its perpendicular position across the road by a rig in only six hours on Saturday.
The $14.2 million bridge was designed to withstand a Category 5 hurricane, the most dangerous measure by the National Hurricane Center, and built to last 100 years.
If lib-tard professor from the Peoples Republic of California and University of California’ Berkeley socialist communist pink-o campus says ‘black’
then I say ‘white’