Wolf Blitzer To NTSB Spokesperson... How about signs... (I-5 Bridge Collapse)

[rsmith6621]

.. being installed on structurally deficient bridges so users know what they are about to cross.


Hey WOLF....How about we put stickers that say this corporation paid no taxes last year.on products sold by corporations that in effect paid ZERO income taxes or hid their $$$ in off shore accounts. They are a great part of the reason that our infrastructure and education system is falling apart.

Wolf go home.

[Politicalboi]

1. Then he would complain about

The costs of making the signs, and the cost of finding out which bridge should get it, and the cost of having someone put it up. Anything but fix it.

What would the sign say? Watch your goats, trolls ahead.

[0rganism]

2. yes, a sign will solve everything

Because when I'm driving 65MPH on I5 and I see a sign that a bridge I'm about to cross is in poor shape, I'm just gonna make a U-turn right in the middle of the interstate and find another way across.

Why don't we just get rid of bridges entirely and cross over chasms and rivers on these magical signs?

[CBGLuthier]

3. Did he ask him if he thanked the lord nobody was killed?

[Spider Jerusalem]

4. There are already signs

[Up2Late]

7. True, but I don't see any on or near that bridge.

See the link in my post below, then zoom into the street view. I'm still looking for any "Low Clearance" signs on the approach to that bridge, but I don't see any, which is troubling.

[Capt.Rocky300]

10. I don't recall ever seeing any.....

and I've driven over that bridge in both directions many hundreds of times in the past 25 years.

[Up2Late]

14. I don't see any either.

I just zoomed backward well past Burlington (looking South) and all I see is a pair of yellow diamonds above some reduced speed limit signs (reduced to 60 MPH), but nothing that would warn of Low clearance on the shoulder of that bridge.

Because of the narrow right shoulder on that bridge and what looks like a low clearance if you drifted into that shoulder area, I would think they should have marked that arching overhead beam. I looks like an accident that was waiting to happen to me.

[Up2Late]

5. I went on the Google Maps Street view, last night, and couldn't find any low clearance signs....

...leading up to that bridge! I mean, if the clearance is THAT close (which it is on that bridge) I would expect to see some clearance warning signs on or leading up to that bride, which I could not find.

Check it out, zoom in until you get to the street view, then go back-wards and see if you can find the low clearance signs. I don't see any.

https://maps.google.com/maps/ms?msid=216082325301142176005.0004dd7e3ee1c37415f1d&msa=0&ll=48.445945,-122.341209&spn=0.000481,0.000748

[KT2000]

12. it is not a low clearance bridge

The height of the bridge was standard. The trailer was over-sized and had a pace car in front of it.

[Spider Jerusalem]

13. I found a news story that says:

There were no signs leading up to the Skagit River bridge to warn about its clearance height. State Transportation Secretary Lynn Peterson said that under federal and state standards, the clearance is tall enough to not require signage.

For reference, the vertical clearance from roadway to steel beam was 14'6". Here's an overpass with seven inches more clearance that's still marked:



The state regulations for highway safety in Washington state may have different criteria; I also found a USDOT memo re vertical clearances on the Interstate Highway System which specify 4.9m (16 feet) vertical clearance, and the Washington State DOT also specifies 16 feet 6 inches (on new structures). Further, contradicting Ms Peterson's statement:

Low clearance warning signs are necessary when the vertical clearance of an existing bridge is less than 15 feet 3 inches. Refer to the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices and the Traffic Manual for other requirements for low-clearance signing.

http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/publications/manuals/fulltext/M22-01/720.pdf

[Up2Late]

15. It will be interesting to hear what the actual clearance was on this bridge...

...because it looks fairly low above the roadway, but it also looks like the bridge has no more than a 1 foot wide shoulder area, and above that tight shoulder is an arching beam that looks much lower than above the lane, so if the load on that truck was both over height and over wide it looks like it would be a very tight clearance. Or it could be the load shifted, and the trailer hit several of the vertical members, as those are just on the other side of the Jersey barriers that were protecting the bridge steel.

[Up2Late]

17. Here's another piece of the puzzle, from one of the surviving witnesses

Trucker with wide load likely cut off at Skagit bridge

BY Tim Haeck on May 24, 2013 @ 11:02 am (Updated: 1:59 pm - 5/24/13 )

Truckers know the dangers of oversized loads and how to maneuver those big rigs along narrow roadways, such as the I-5 bridge across the Skagit River.

Other drivers might get angry if they don't understand why a trucker would hog the road approaching a narrow bridge. Puyallup trucker Jim Detwiler has crossed the Skagit River bridge many times and explained how it's done with an oversized load.

"The normal procedure would be for a trucker to position themselves in both lanes, going down the center to give themselves enough space for clear passage."

Bridge collapse survivor Dan Sligh said he saw the truck displaying the wide load sign approach the bridge with a load that appeared to be 3 or 4 feet wider than the actual bridge.

"And at the last minute, there was a second semi that came up on the left side, it appeared, like it almost pinned that truck in from being able to come over left," said Sligh. "At that point, the wide load caught the right side of the bridge."

(more at link)

http://mynorthwest.com/11/2281588/Trucker-with-wide-load-likely-cut-off-at-Skagit-bridge

[nilram]

18. Yeah, I didn't see any, either. Have you noticed, though, how Google has copyrighted the earth?

Everywhere I look (c) Google... Just look at the street view. Everywhere.

[Apophis]

6. Instead of signs, use the money to fix the goddamn bridge.

[Up2Late]

8. That bridge is over 50 years old, it should be replaced.

The recent highway report characterized it as functionally obsolete and fracture critical.

http://mynorthwest.com/11/2281457/Collapsed-I5-bridge-characterized-as-functionally-obsolete-fracture-critical

[rhett o rick]

19. That had nothing to do with this disaster. The bridge was structurally sound. If this truck

would have done this the day after the bridge was opened, it would have collapsed.

[Up2Late]

20. Did you read the article that I linked to, it tells what "fracture critical" means.

"...This is what they call a fracture-critical bridge, which means if any part of the bridge fails, there is no redundancy built into it so it will all collapse," CBS News Transportation Safety Analyst and former NTSB Chair Mark Rosenker tells KIRO Radio Seattle's Morning News....

Plus

"...This particular bridge is now around 57 years old and with corrosion taking its toll, as well as what we call fatigue of the steel structure itself, so they are past their design life...."

What that means is, every year you use this bridge past it's "design life" you are pushing your luck. It's the same reason we don't fly on Boeing 707s and DC-8s anymore, because metal fatigue is a real thing.

Plus the bridge is just barely wide enough for 4 lanes of traffic, so their is only about 18 inches between the traffic and the vertical steel, so no room to put any sort of breakdown lane as a buffer, need I go on?

[rhett o rick]

21. The bridge was "fracture critical" the day is was completed. What happened had nothing to do with

it's age or maintenance. The truck destroyed the bridge as it would have if it had happened the day after it was completed.

[Up2Late]

22. Maybe so, but it has a history of getting hit and was hit in the same spot sometime in the past...

...according to this new news report.

http://www.komonews.com/news/local/Inspection-reports-Skagit-River-bridge-hit-a-number-of-times-by-big-trucks-208901691.html?tab=video&c=y

Also, it says "...The bridge is considered structurally obsolete, meaning the span built in 1955, does not meet current specifications like wider shoulders and higher superstructure...."


And now WSDOT Secretary, Lynn Peterson, is calling this "bad luck" that the bridge to a hit in the same spot!

BAD LUCK?! Sounds to me like this bridge just ran out of luck, a bridge can only take so many hits before this sort of thing happens.

And she says that, even though current law says any bridge with a clearance under 15' 3" needs to have a warning sign to let drivers know the current clearance, this bridge is "...listed clearance of just over 14 feet..., but...no height limit (is) posted on the (this) bridge..." But she says, "There are certain heights of bridges where we do not need to sign and this would have been one of those bridges."

Btw, this bridge was built in 1955, a year before The Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 was even passed! Now I bet this bridge was great when it was part of U.S. 99 when it was most likely only carrying 2 lanes of traffic, but when they crammed 2 more lanes onto this bridge, they took away the extra margin for error that it originally had.

Sorry, but in the United States of America, having one of the most important interstate highways (I-5) using a bridge this old in an area with so few alternate routes between the U.S. and Canada is just outrageous and shameful.

[rhett o rick]

23. I did not intend to come across as opposing replacing the outdated bridge.

I meant only clarify that it wasnt the integrity of the bridge. The truck destroyed the integrity of the bridge. I totally agree that these old bridges should be replaced.

[WestStar]

9. I'm not surprised that Blitzed wouldn't know, it is CNN after all

But the spokesmouth from the NTSB should know the difference between "structurally deficient" and "functionally obsolete".

Now that's scary.

[dixiegrrrrl]

11. Wolfie, you swiss cheese brained incompetent moran....why don't REPORT the news

instead of trying to BE the news?
The Lord told me to tell you that.

[eissa]

16. Devil's advocate here

I was watching Wolfie when he said that, and I gotta say that for a second I did ponder his proposal. Ideally, yes, the money spent on signs could instead be spent on actually repairing bridges. But I wonder the public reaction of seeing those signs? Would it motivate the citizenry to pressure their reps to spend money on infrastructure (for a change) rather than arming rebels in Syria, or giving yet another tax cut to the "job creators"? As we've seen with the sequester, its biggest proponents balk when the actual cuts affect them. Perhaps if people saw that it was the bridges they cross on a daily basis, it might get them to understand how important it is that we do some nation building here.

[rhett o rick]

24. Infrastructure maintenance is the unseen tax. The longer we go w/o addressing the issue

the bigger our infrastructure debt becomes. I believe it's well over a trillion dollars now.

[randome]

25. And so many jobs would be created. We're treading water when we should be speed swiming.

[hr]
[font color="blue"][center]Stop looking for heroes. BE one.[/center][/font]
[hr]