‘Deficient’ Bridge Collapses
Forty-five years of corrosive road salt draining onto one side of an overpass and a history of trucks hitting its underside likely caused a 53-foot-long, 60-ton concrete beam to come crashing onto Interstate 70 in Washington County Tuesday evening.
That probable cause emerged after Pennsylvania Department of Transportation engineers examined the site in South Strabane yesterday.
“We believe it was a combination of age, wear and tear in the structure, a history of being hit by trucks and, very recently, another hit” that took its toll, said Gary Hoffman, a career civil engineer and No. 2 in the PennDOT hierarchy. “The bridge slopes toward the beam and the effect of road salt is one thing we’ll be looking at in a forensic analysis.”
On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being excellent condition, the Lake View Drive overpass received a score of 4, a rating that means the bridge was “structurally deficient,” Mr. Hoffman said. Still, the overpass was judged structurally capable of carrying 40-ton trucks, the maximum legal load in Pennsylvania. The overpass is lightly traveled, mostly by locals.
Read the whole article at post-gazette.com »
There are currently no comments on this thread.