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The bridge in a Merrillville, Indiana park that collapsed on July 4th, injuring 25, was overloaded to twice its capacity, according to an initial investigation. The collapse sent more than 50 people tumbling into the water below, though no one was seriously hurt. Ross Township Trustee John Rooda said, "There were far too many people on the bridge. It was overloaded. We had uniformed (Merrillville) police officers at both ends. We shoot for 20 people. It can handle up to 40. We're confident there were twice as many on the bridge." The park was closed yesterday for the investigation and is expected to reopen today. The bridge, of course, remains closed. [CBS 2, Fox 32]
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While I am not a structural engineer it seems like a design flaw to make a bridge large enough to hold 80 people but only strong enough to hold 40. Plus once you figure in obesity rate in Indiana the designed loads were significantly exceeded.
Sounds more like a common sense flaw to me. Just because there's space to cram 80 people doesn't mean that's a particularly good idea.
If you figure an average weight of 200 pounds per person and take the Hoosiers at their word, then this bridge was designed to handle a maximum of 8,000 pounds. I also am not a structural engineer, but that seems low to me for what google Earth suggests is a 120-foot span.
The layout of the park suggests that the park's designers intended crowds to take the bridge ... the distance from the baseball diamonds to the parking lot is almost doubled for those who go around the lake. This all suggests that park designers should have foreseen that large crowds would want to use that bridge and taken steps to prevent it having to handle loads beyond what they knew were tolerable.
All this to say that somebody's gonna get sued.
I would like to confer upon all of us an honorary degree in armchair structural engineering. Congratulations. Using our collective expertise I'm quite certain we can assess the failure rate of bridges that have already failed.
Not to toot my own horn but I was very vocal about lacks monitoring standards concerning the bridge failure in Minneapolis as soon as read that it had collapsed on cnn.com.
Finally I won't look like a nut wearing a cap and gown.
I strongly supported an aerodynamic assessment of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge as soon as I saw the film of its collapse, but I was completely ignored by the engineers who built the structure 30 years before I was born. Because of this, an innocent, three-legged dog had to die.