Not good enough. If some bridge is decades old, I don't think it's fair to expect some firm that is the descendant of whatever firm designed it so long ago to be liable, especially when all the people ever involved in design and building it are probably dead or close to it.
The real fault is with the government, and especially the elected politicians who don't run the government properly and get these things inspected and fixed (and worse, run on platforms of shrinking government). Why aren't they ever personally liable? They should be.
I'm sure limitations on liability is a heavily legislated and litigated area of law. I have no idea about the details, and am thus am not supporting any particular position, merely relaying some info.
I don't think engineers are being prosecuted for criminal negligence in cases like this - rather, the firms have civil liability. As far as holding politicians personally liable, they can be prosecuted if they break the law. Other than that, I envision it would be chaos if individuals could sue politicians for how they do their job.
So you're saying it's unreasonable to expect maintenance continuity over multiple decades from a private company and its employees, but it is resonable to expect the very same thing from a party that's less knowledgeable and less financially invested in the project?
To me that feels lacking, unless the government bodies responsible for infrastructure maintenance get proper resources and time and expertise to do this on a large scale. Can people today really expect to understand how things were built a 100 years ago? (honest question, imagine the same for IT)
It's unreasonable to hold the original engineer responsible for changes after construction that should require review/stamp/signature from another engineer, such as increasing the depth of the pavement on the roadway. If the bridge didn't meet the code at the time it was built, that's one thing. But that's not the case here.
Also, the private engineering firm likely had nothing to do with the maintenance of the bridge after construction -- That's the job of the state DOT and whoever they contract out to.
There's a lot of knowledge and experience in State DOTs, they'll do some bridges in house, some they contract out for. (WA state, states may vary, depends on budgeting conditions and workload.) The older engineers there are generally really smart, and have been doing it for a long time. In stark contrast to the computer industry, experience really does mean something.
Less knowledgeable and less financially interested? The politicians are the ones who make the ultimate decisions about these projects: whether maintenance will be done (by controlling the budget), whether a replacement will be done, etc. They're the MOST invested in the project, and should be held the most accountable. Why should decision-makers get to run away scot-free after their bad decisions wreak havoc?
They may take some of the decisions, but that doesn't make them knowledgeable or financially invested. How would a politician make money from a construction project? The company that engineered it does, sure, but the guy who commissioned it? He benefits from being in office.
> Can people today really expect to understand how things were built a 100 years ago?
Yes. This can be done.
The same as today, 100 years ago designs were based in calculations of the bridge response to the expected loads. Today, we know better what are those loads and how to calculate the response of the structure, but it is the same process.
Construction itself has also changed with the years. We have ways to asset materials and machine them that are way ahead of what we had 100 years ago, we can assembly the bridge with much more precision, and the efficiency of our tools has vastly improved, but the principles are the same.
Hmmmm. You might be right, but I'm just thinking about what I read about difficulties replicating the Saturn V rockets, which obviously were built much later than 100 years ago, under extreme scrutiny of top-of-the-line engineering of their time, and yet, we can't build them again from original blueprints.
The issue seems to be that despite having extremely detailed blueprints a lot of the actual assembly was left to skilled welders and technicians on site, and they used techniques which were not documented. So You can look at the blueprint, you can look at the actual remaining Saturn-V rocket, and still have no idea how two elements were welded together to withstand launching into space, because it's just not documented anywhere. The person who did the weld is long dead, so in a way, an extremely important element of assembly is lost and has to be replicated by experimentation.
I'd imagine it's the same with bridges - blueprints might say that a column of specific durability was used, but it won't say how it was made, and therefore you won't know what can break inside it.
The other factor I read regarding the difficulties of resurrecting the Saturn V engines, was that they used a lot of mechanical feedback control systems to regulate fuel flow etc.
Modern engineers can understand them in theory, but they'd just use a micro-controller for anything that complicated, so they don't have the same fluency in those systems as the original engineers.
The real fault is with the government, and especially the elected politicians who don't run the government properly and get these things inspected and fixed (and worse, run on platforms of shrinking government). Why aren't they ever personally liable? They should be.