I don't see why one would jump to blaming the engineers from the 1960's instead of the very government bureaucracy that was responsible for funding the maintenance and oversight of the bridge for over five decades. I do wonder if it is possible the "violent downburst" in the article could have created enough force on the bridge to push it past it's load-rating though.
edit: I should add that it could very well be the fault of an engineer from 50 years ago (poor design, implementation), but this just happened today and it will take a while for people to figure out what really happened, and without any other data my first inclination is to think "poor maintenance" as that is what Occam's Razor (simple: lack of maintenance is very common these days, at least in the US: prepare to be afraid of many bridges you drive over[0]) and then there's the whole downburst thing that seems vaguely plausible for now.
edit2: "The U.S. has 614,387 bridges, almost four in 10 of which are 50 years or older. 56,007 — 9.1% — of the nation’s bridges were structurally deficient in 2016, and on average there were 188 million trips across a structurally deficient bridge each day. While the number of bridges that are in such poor condition as to be considered structurally deficient is decreasing, the average age of America’s bridges keeps going up and many of the nation’s bridges are approaching the end of their design life. The most recent estimate puts the nation’s backlog of bridge rehabilitation needs at $123 billion."[1]
> I don't see why one would jump to blaming the engineers from the 1960's instead of [...] the maintenance
Unfortunately, in this case it's probably a bit of both. A bridge that was the direct precursor to this one, collapsed after a few years. Maintenance expenses for the Genoa bridge were already off the charts 20 years ago, and likely went down after its privatisation. It had been described a few years ago as a "failure of engineering" by several people.
Chances are that everyone involved in its maintenance knew that shit could hit the fan at some point, but there was no political will to close one of the main city arteries, and probably no budget (or even space, in that city) to build a replacement either.
Being a civil engineer can be tough, especially in complicated countries like Italy. The main architect is long dead; the country has been broke for decades now; the elements are unforgiving; and people are more than ready to lynch you if shit happens.
in a way that was not accounted for, yes. Other bits of the bridge were reinforced, apparently, but not that one. It is significant because the Italian bridge also had to be signficiantly reinforced at the base, about 20 years after construction.
I would never blame an Italian civil engineer. They are amongst the best of the world.
It's most likely a corrupt contractor paired with a corrupt politician to blame. They usually use bad or sloppy concrete, or not the planned amount of steel the engineer demanded.
Interest on public debt (which is 130% of GDP, inferior only to Japan [1]) makes it basically impossible to have any sort of expansive economic policy. Since the '90s, any investment has to be financed with cuts elsewhere (this has even been enshrined in the Constitution, for good measure). The state routinely struggles to pay for schools and police cars, and to hire replacements for retiring civil servants or doctors. One year, the state literally took a chunk of money out of all bank accounts overnight; a repeat has recently been considered.
The country is broke, but our survival skills are so proverbial that the markets more or less trust we'll always come up with enough money to keep going. The day this stops being true, we'll go the Argentina way very quickly.
> One year, the state literally took a chunk of money out of all bank accounts overnight
To be fair, that was 1992 so way before the euro. The problem is that ratings are easy to send down, but very hard to bring back up. Currently they are just two steps above junk, (despite having had pretty low interest until a few days before the current government swore in). Even just a single downgrading would be bad, two would lead to a massive sell and basically a disaster way worse than the Argentinian crisis.
I never mentioned the Euro, the country was on life support well before that. In many ways, the Euro was actually the first step towards a "get out of jail" card. Unfortunately, the second one (Eurobonds) hasn't happened yet.
Yes, I agree. I just wanted to say that the economic situation at the time of the "prelievo forzoso" was very different. I agree with your definition of the Euro as a "get out of jail" card, too.
Italy is currently seen as the EU country most likely to collapse financially. There were severe doubts about what was going to happen when a new government was inaugurated a month or so ago. Spain is also not doing very well, but not in short-term danger. US and UK are doing much better (I don't know much about Japan).
Even worse is that several of the major Italian banks have a large exposure to Turkey including UniCredit. Italy has the worst youth unemployment in the EU[1]. Consequentially, there was a large amount of drug use in the city I lived in.
I don't feel like the US is doing better. The public debt as a percentage of the GDP isn't the only public debt number that matters. The absolute number and the public debt per capita also matter.
You must have missed the news these last few years.
As soon as the markets get a whiff of potential instability in the country that would cause a deviation on the austerity policy imposed by the EU, the credit spread on goverment bonds skyrockets.
And with some good reason, as pre-EU governments used devaluation of the Lira to boost the exports and increase GDP (of course increasing inflation) on one hand, and kept borrowing money on the other, instead of trying to address historical problems like under-development of the South, unsustainable social security, rampant tax evasion, corruption in local administrations.
Even if currency devaluation were possible these days (basically only by leaving the EU), it would have to face a much more globalized economy than last century, where many exports depend on parts manufactured abroad, which would be suddenly more expensive to produce...
Italy is not broke as long it can pay interests on its debt, but every fluctuation in the global economy affect Italy way more than UK, US or Japan.
>56,007 — 9.1% — of the nation’s bridges were structurally deficient in 2016, and on average there were 188 million trips across a structurally deficient bridge each day
This number is kept higher than it needs to be for economic/political reasons. If your bridge is about to fall down at any minute it's easier to get federal dollars (or justify using your existing dollars) to build a new bridge. As a result there's lots of bridges that are past due with shovel ready plans for replacement but the local/state gov is just waiting for it to become a crisis so that they don't have to pay for as much of the fix. If the replacement bridge requires taking private land, disrupting traffic, etc, etc. there's even more reason to wait for a crisis.
A bridge can be considered "structurally deficient" if destroying one member can cause the bridge to collapse, but the bridge can otherwise last decades or centuries more. The solution being stop letting idiots drive oversize loads on them and they'll be just fine without spending billions of dollars on replacements.
I don't perceive any blame in the comment you are responding to, only observations relating to the history of bridges and the responsibility that comes with it. What did you feel was assigning blame when you read it?
Whether or not it was intended, the entire comment implies exactly that - particularly with the call to the responsibility, ethics and standards of the civil engineers.
For example, if someone dies in a car crash, it's a little out of context for you to focus on the responsibility and ethics of the car designer over and above the circumstances of the crash. Usually the latter focus is for when there's concern about said ethics and responsibilities.
edit: I should add that it could very well be the fault of an engineer from 50 years ago (poor design, implementation), but this just happened today and it will take a while for people to figure out what really happened, and without any other data my first inclination is to think "poor maintenance" as that is what Occam's Razor (simple: lack of maintenance is very common these days, at least in the US: prepare to be afraid of many bridges you drive over[0]) and then there's the whole downburst thing that seems vaguely plausible for now.
edit2: "The U.S. has 614,387 bridges, almost four in 10 of which are 50 years or older. 56,007 — 9.1% — of the nation’s bridges were structurally deficient in 2016, and on average there were 188 million trips across a structurally deficient bridge each day. While the number of bridges that are in such poor condition as to be considered structurally deficient is decreasing, the average age of America’s bridges keeps going up and many of the nation’s bridges are approaching the end of their design life. The most recent estimate puts the nation’s backlog of bridge rehabilitation needs at $123 billion."[1]
[0]https://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/americas-grades/
[1]https://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/cat-item/bridges/