Per the article:
So if they weren’t being asked to assess the truss structure I don’t think they’d be held responsible for failing to see that. Usually when outside inspectors at my work are brought in they have a very specific inspection scope, and will note any unrelated obvious issues that they happen to notice, but aren’t expected to produce a comprehensive report.
Do the drones actually catch more problems or do they just allow inspectors to not find problems more quickly so the state has to employ fewer of them?
The footage, published recently by ARDOT states that it was captured in May 2019 by Michael Baker International Inspection Firm. They are publishing it now to show that it was easily visible by the inspector but not included in his shitty report.
Look, they did rigorous inspecting for the first 30 years and never had an issue, so obviously the inspection team wasn’t cost effective and the budget needed trimming…
According to the Federal Highway Administration, which is part of the Department of Transportation, 45,031 of the 618,456 bridges they rated were ranked as poor. The rest were split fairly evenly between good and fair, 278,433 to 294,992.
If you’re interested in how your state’s bridges rate, here’s a report generated from the DOT data. Nine of the structurally deficient bridges in my state have over 100k daily crossings.
Who inspects the bridge inspectors?
Over time opinions become solid truths. Crack truly is Whack.
Which has literally nothing to do with my point. It’s that most people - even people who are political active, educated, and well read - do not have hours each week to devote to reading reports on how their state’s roads are, among the many other things that we need to understand. If you have all that extra time, that’s great. Most of us have jobs (some more than one), and families, and pets, and laundry, etc, etc. They literally depend on the people they elect to do this sort of thing for them. That is litearlly why we elect people to public office, to make sure this stuff gets sorted out so that our lives can run smoothly. The fact that in so many cases it is not, shows that far too many people getting into office are not doing their jobs. 
Is this a case of inattentional blindness? The workers in the video were inspecting the cables, not the rigid structural members. I saw the crack in the lower right of the frame, but only because I had been primed with its current appearance. If I was tasked with inspecting that video, but my focus was on the cable (which is why most of the footage is above the level of the cracked member), I might have missed the crack, too. Routine inspection should of course catch this kind of obvious structural defect, but IMO the video in question is not necessarily evidence of negligence, per se.
How many bridge inspector inspectors do they have and how many bridge inspectors need inspector-inspecting?
I’m wondering if a fracture through an entire major beam like that is so far out of their normal experience that they just didn’t look for such a thing, and were, instead, looking for rusty bolts and whatever they usually find and repair?
(That or they really could just be really be corrupt and/or incompetent…)
My point is that maintenance is not a hot button issue, and people need to elect representatives who are willing to put money into it. The trend for the last couple of decades has been to cut the taxes that pay for infrastructure maintenance as if it were an unnecessary expense. While the party of tax cuts and small government is most guilty of this, the Democrats haven’t always fought for this either.
It’s not like the bridge would have actually been fixed if the inspector had reported it. /s
The people inspecting the wires with the drone aren’t the same one that was supposed to inspect the bridge for other structural problems and who has been fired now.
Apparently the Victorian engineers who checked the railway bridge over the River Tay used to fill casting cracks with a mixture of ‘iron filings, beeswax, and rosin’.
Well, hopefully.
Or possibly they did notice it, but assumed it was so obvious that there was no way the people responsible for inspecting that part could possibly have missed it, so they didn’t mention it.
Did I disagree with that? MY point, which people seem to be studiously ignoring, is that most Americans don’t have the time to understand aspects of these issues and DEPEND on their elected officials to have their backs.
So ONCE AGAIN I agree that people depend on their officials to understand it, but I disagree it’s not a hot button issue. There is no such thing anymore.
But since no one seems interested in reading my actual comments, I’ll bow out and let people who actual listen to each other talk, since i’m clearly not being heard. Once again.
I take it that it was the first Tay Bridge that they did this on?
Yep. Number two was aluminium foil and Cow Gum. No expense spared.
hey there are bathrooms to protect, women’s rights to take away, and votes to stop – who has time after all that?
