I know that's an international standards, and in general it's safe and nothing to worry about, but I hate the fact that we build houses under bridges or bridges above houses. Even probable things like a drunk throwing glass bottle to my garden from moving train scare shit out of me.
People committing suicide in Seattle, jumping from the 99 bridge, led to at least one PTSD retirement from Adobe. People seemed not to want to land in the water, but on land, and the Adobe area was apparently an inviting target.
Some homeless guys smoking crack under an overpass ignited nearby material; the resulting fire led to the collapse of a stretch of I-85 in Atlanta last year.
Don't live under a bridge if you can help it. Given the state of disrepair of most American infrastructure it takes very little to bring them down.
We're not waiting, we're currently reinforcing the dikes so they'll be estimated to break only once every 100,000 years instead of every 10,000 years, while taking sea level rise into account.
There's that one dike in Wilnis though that threatens to break every time we have a severe drought, like this year...
It dries out, loses volume and weight, then deforms and tears. There was a dike near Wilnis that actually broke in 2003, leading to half a metre of water in some streets there. Maybe the dike that was in the news a few weeks ago (it didn't quite break, but there was some danger) was a different one; I didn't check, but it was also near that village.
That green delivery truck (middle, left side) is really close to the edge of the collapsed section. What a nightmare for a driver of being so close to dying and seeing the entire thing happen (I assume).
There was at least one truck on the collapsed section where the driver survived (albeit with some injuries). Quoted as "I was normally driving, when the road just disappeared and everything started falling."
If you're building a tall apartment block you're already trusting your building regulations/safety practices to prevent disaster; having a bridge above you doesn't seem inherently more risky than having n floors of housing above you.
It's Genoa: sandwiched between sea and mountains, space is at a premium. Think of those lovely shots of Manarola and Cinque Terre, multiply them by a million, add one of Europe's biggest ports, and that's Genoa.
Not just a trainyard: reportedly the bridge runs above Ansaldo Energia, a big company that makes generators and turbines. So yeah, definitely not prime land, but still crowded.
