For us, it was the million dollar highway, Colorado. Parts of the road breaks off and slides down the mountain.
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+1
I just recalled the situation that led me to get an Umbrella Policy for the first time. One of the other guys on the faculty had a teenaged daughter who was covered by his auto insurance policy. The girl was involved in an accident in which she was considered to be liable, and the other party sued my co-worker for damages that far exceeded the coverage of his auto policy.
Over the space of the next two years, until the case was resolved, I saw my friend visually age to an incredible extent, due to the stress that he was experiencing. I had never before heard of an Umbrella Policy, but after a lot of discussions at work, I learned of their existence and their importance, and as a result of my co-worker’s experience, I have had that type of extra coverage for several decades.
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Back to dangerous roads. I’m a little tired today after getting up to watch coverage of the key bridge collapse in Baltimore. Seemed like a classic design failure with continuous truss system allowing total collapse by losing one support.
In his video on epic engineering failures, Stephen ressler, West Point professor, analyzes the failure of the Florida sunshine skyway bridge collapse after one pillar was hit by a ship. It looks to be pretty similar to the key bridge but I’ll have to review it.
I hate bridges and there are a number of similar designs still in use. If you go to wiki, you can actually take a drive across the bridge as it was.
I bet most every bridge will collapse if you knock out one of the two supports.
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A huge, fully loaded container ship moving at about 8 knots hit the support. As @texases said, no surprise that the bridge was severely damaged given the circumstances. Fortunately no one using the bridge was on it. The bridge was shut down after the ship issued a mayday. At least 7 bridge workers are still missing and two were rescued.
That’s a demo of a pretty good safety system, that it worked that quickly. I presume the “mayday” doesn’t go direclty to the folks operating the bridge, so it had to be relayed to them quite expeditiously for a quick vehicle-crossing shutdown.
When the sky bridge in Tampa was rebuilt with a new bridge, it was a suspension type not a through truss with a cantilever. Plus the supports were protected so that a ship could not damage the supports. The 35w bridge failed because of a lack of redundancy as did the silver bridge where the loss of one component would cause the loss of the whole bridge.
The key bridge evidently had some protection for the piers but obviously inadequate. Plus if you watch the video of the way it came down, it appears the sections were a cantilever design so when one section was damaged, the other sections tilted and collapsed.
Knowing the deficiency in design, plus the high ship traffic, at the very least the piers should have been better protected. There are at least ten other similar through truss bridges in daily use.
Bridge designing is tricky business . About 25 years ago the Golden Gate bridge was closed to vehicle traffic for a day as part of a celebration, allowing crowds of pedestrians free reign to amble over the bridge at their leisure. At one point the crowds got so big the normal curvature of the road surface – usually highest at the middle – started to noticeably flatten. Fortunately the bridge was able to handle the unexpected load.
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And my wife got rear ended stopped at a light, Big name layers, the guy no extra insurance, ended up with 19k only because lawyer negotiated with the doctors as the guy was not worth going after for additional Bucks.