I highly, highly recommend checking out the NTSB report on this, I've never seen an angrier post-incident report. Special shout out to the mentioned 'back-of-the-envelope' calculations being shown literally fitting on the back of an envelope.
Yeah, the NTSB report is fantastic. My wife works as a project manager designing roadways and bridges, she has all her interns and new staff watch the NTSB summary of the collapse together. It's always interesting to hear the youngster's answers to the question, "so who was primarily responsible?". There's so many things that went wrong with the FIU bridge. So many systems which were meant to catch a dangerous design were deliberately circumvented or ignored. Regrettably, that exact kind of corner-curtting happens on _every_ public works project. There's constant pressure to do things like skip the peer review, argue the DOT into submission, or make your design exempt from the typical reviews to save time and money.
Agreed. NTSB/CSB reports are supposed to be impartial, that's the whole point, they can't even be used in a court of law. But you can tell that whoever wrote that one was genuinely, genuinely seething about what happened. It was actually refreshing to be reminded that behind the almost empathy-less reports (again, that's not what they are for), it is still a human being(s).
For the record, the back-of-the-envelope thing is on the illustrated digest (SPC-20-02). Don't be like me, who, being a certified moron, tried to search through the entire accident report (NTSB/HAR-19/02) for the word "envelope"... That being said, the board member statement by Landsberg gave me the distinct feeling that he wanted to violently shake and strangle someone at FIGG, Louis Berger, MCM, Bolton Perez, FDOT, and/or FIU.
I checked it out and damn: "When the inevitable began to happen a creeping, catastrophic material failure, nobody did anything, despite what NTSB Chairman Sumwalt accurately described as the “bridge screaming at everyone that it was failing.” Why? Once the cracking became evident, not one of the organizations involved was willing to take the essential and unpopular step to call a halt and close the road."
"Florida was a mistake." As a born and raised Floridian, I have to say: being a backwater, statewide retirement home built on limestone, swamp muck, and loose sand only just above sea level and in the direct path of some of the most frequent and severe weather patterns with all state government bending over backwards for Disney's corporate whims at the explicit expense of the citizens doesn't make us a mistake. We are "The Greatest Mistake of America". From civil rights to city planning to pandemic response to public transportation, there isn't a goddamn thing we haven't completely fucked up, and as such, you will refer to our godforsaken, fetid cesspool by its proper title. Thank you.
I visited Florida a good many years ago. I realised that, in Florida, every negative stereotype about America is true. Big roads to carry the big cars to carry the big, fat people who waddle from parking lot to store, and return with carts loaded with sugar and fat. A flag on every building, and a church on every street. The people seemed nice enough though, once you realise they are so adjusted to their strange world that it all feels normal to them.
Born and raised just south of Tampa. I love so much about this state and all that it's had to offer. But for nearly 100 years everything about it is being exploited and destroyed. Also the Fetishizing I hear people talk about Desantis worries the fuck out of me.
God, as a person with a disability (not in a wheelchair but mobility is hard) these overpasses are genuinely very difficult to handle, painful and add WAY more time to your trip.
@@grmpEqweer that's the big problem, yeah, cities have been built for cars and not pedestrians, and especially not in consideration of pedestrians with mobility challenges. With things as they are it's hard to see a solution, but I'm also not an expert on urban design or anything.
@@goosiesmoosies Most of the pedestrian overpasses in my city have ramps shaped like corkscrews at either end, rather than stairs, which everyone uses: walkers, cyclists, wheelchair users. Of course many of them are still blocks from anywhere you might be coming from, or going to.
They are a fucking disaster. Wtyp is right on the money here. Overpass shouldn't exist. There should be a continuous sidewalk on a traffic calmed street and cars shouldn't be traveling at great speeds inside areas where pedestrians are.
Ah, yes the Florida pedestrian bridge. A bridge engineering disaster on top of a highway engineering disaster. I like how the media tried to latch on to the Accelerated Bridge Construction for a scapegoat. Meanwhile, engineers across the country were like "They tried to make a truss bridge out of WHAT??"
"design that looks like it's load-bearing, but is actually just ornamental" feels like the equivalent of a putting a ferrari-chassi on a bad car. It's only impressive to people who will glance at it for a second. It seems silly to try to flex with a bridge-design (ostensibly to show how skilled you are at engineering) when actual engineers know that what "looks high-tech and complicated" is basically just a painted-on racing stripe. It sorta defeats the purpose of a statement-piece if the main function of the "statement" is to pretend to be a well-integrated, functional part that also looks nice, when it's actually just all looks, and functionally superfluous. If this was interior-design, that kind of approach to form would probably be perceived as "tacky", "gauche" or even camp.
@@twothreebravo I remember watching that episode (I've watched it several times) and I get that a lot of the "solutions" are sorta eccentric, and definitely something a person without any architecture or engineering-background would do, but I think some of the critiques in that bonus-episode was a little "over-stated". Sure, not accommodating the full depth of your fridge so it sticks out awkwardly is a real blunder - especially since it should be fairly easy to fix, unless the back of your fridge is pushed out due to a weird dimension of the wall behind it - but the exterior of the house sorta struck me as "generic american house design". It was clowned on a bit in the episode, but - and maybe I'm kinda shading a lot of contemporary american house designs - but to me the exterior of that house just read like "sure, that's an american house-exterior." Very little - if any - of american house-architecture seems to feel bound by the kind of restraint (or "historical call-back") that you would find in european countries. And if an american were to self-consciously try to imitate - for example - 19th century peasant architecture, it would probably just feel as arbitrary and "unreal" as the neighboring McMansion (there was that story a year or so ago of a rich american sinking an enormous amount of money to build a 14-16th century european wine-country-castle, and despite probably being extremely accurate, it just came across as nervously fumbling for historical prestige). I think because the US is sorta unique in it's culture of "new nation, no old rules, we'll make it up as we go along" I feel like at least the exterior of Grover House is more or less indistinguishable from the wildly hodge-podge, constantly clashing approach to design that is american home-architecture. None of the exterior of Grover House struck me as outlandish in the context of a country that has McMansions that look like they are made out of spray-painted foam-bricks, and chain-restaurants that has this very peculiar "neo-brutalist shoe-box" shapes (low, wide brick-buildings with no exterior details outside a few windows and a big company sign over the main entry).
Actually you have it a little backwards with the car analogy, having a Ferrari chassis under a shitty looking car would result in a really well performing car that looks like dogshit What you're looking for is putting a Ferrari body on a shitty chassis, that way it looks pretty but actually performs like dogshit. :)
@@TrashHeapCustodian That's what I meant; when I said chassi I was thinking of the word as it's being used for computer cases, so the outermost exterior of an object. I am not a car guy.
May I suggest an episode on the 1992 Guadalajara explosions? Galvanic corrosion caused a leak in a gasoline pipeline which leaked into the sewer causing an enormous explosion that blew up the roads.
Either Justin has a template script that he fills in with the current story, or he has an amazing memory to remember always using the same phrases. After a couple dozen episodes, you can narrate the exact phrases of the early and late parts of the episode. :D Justin: "Okay, so I thought a good place to start -" Everyone: "WOULD BE TO ASK: WHAT IS A BRIDGE?!"
The amount of hate and misogyny I have seen being spread by people who falsely believe that either "it was a female lead engineer" or "it was an all female-led team" is frankly upsetting on multipe levels. I wish we, as a society, could educate these people with the help of a focused burst of energy... to the face... in a closed fist formation.
I might be wrong but I have vague memories of reading comments like those, looking up info about the company that built the bridge and finding out they were owned by libertarians or something who had a bunch of financial ties to the Florida Republican party.
shit like this is so funny because as someone who actually consistently interacted with students studying civil engineering its obvious that gender has absolutely no bearing on general competence. these idiots just cant handle the fact that some women are doing better things than them
Can confirm the annoyingness of being disabled and using a pedestrian bridge. The bus I take home from school stops on the other side of 7 lanes of traffic, and using the ramps to cross the pedestrian bridge, which is a relatively small bridge adds about an extra 500m to the walk. The bus is scheduled to arrive a very short amount of time after I get out of school, about 10 minutes, and the stop is about a 10 minute walk from the school when using the stairs on the bridge. When using my forearm crutches, which can do stairs but it's annoying and takes forever, taking the ramp is the better option, but that extra walk means I can't make that bus and end up waiting 30-45 minutes because my city doesn't really run Busses more frequently than that. I haven't used a wheelchair on this particular bridge, but the ramps in my school are too steep to wheel yourself up or down, if the ramps on a pedestrian bridge are designed like that and you don't have someone to push you, they're about as accessible as stairs.
@4:40 "I do like that his midlife crisis, instead of being like a Corvette or a 9/11..." Cue 5 minutes of me trying to think if 9/11 was Dubya's midlife crisis, Osama's, maybe the hijackers???? Before finally realizing you meant a Porsche.
@@Leeqzombie Your parent too? My mother does that. Outside of the car, no overt racism ever displayed. Works aside people of all races, no issues at all. But put her behind the wheel and suddenly that changes - every time another drives acts poorly on the road she will try to get a look into their cab and unleash some disparaging comment about their race or, if the driver is white, their assumed immigrant status.
Please add Molybdenum to my water supply. If I’m going out, I want to go out with as many adorable mispronunciations from medical staff in my ears as possible.
I measured the seven corners pedestrian bridge. If you're a wheelchair user next to the stairs on one side and want to get to the stairs on the other side (200ft/60m away), you have to go 1500ft/460m to take the ramp path Justin described
I really like your podcast. It is hard to find true geeks that have radio quality voices. I have an M.A.Sc. in structural design and have been practicing for more than 30 years. I also own my own structural consulting firm. I spent way too much time looking at this incident. The post tensioning and reinforcing was essentially a steel bridge with concrete cast over it. There are some examples of concrete trusses. The ones I know of are all prestressed (post-tensioning is actually just of form of pre-stressing). There is less maintenance with concrete. Steel has to be painted on a regular basis especially when it is close to the ocean. That was the idea with the titanium dioxide additive in the concrete to make it self cleaning. The main motivation was to reduce the cost of overall maintenance. Heavy structures also tend to also do better in high winds such as hurricanes. So it was not an irrational decision to make the bridge out of concrete. This incident will probably stop engineers from making the same decision to use concrete trusses but there actually is a place for them (just not a common place). The funky shape was not an issue. It really came down to a simple design flaw. Interface shear is checked on a regular basis in most concrete structures. It only takes a few minutes to calculate the shear stress at the joint. The level of stress should have indicated that the interface shear would be difficult to justify and that the shear area and amount of steel should have been increased. Louis Berger (and any engineer that works with concrete) would know what interface shear was and how to calculate the interface shear resistance. Louis Berger had the technical ability to do the check properly, they just didn't meet the guidelines with the project requirements which is different than saying that they weren't qualified. It is common practice for all major structures to have concept reviews. That is not special to this project. The scope of the concept review was actually reduced to save money, which is actually more unusual. The reduction of scope of the concept review could potentially be considered a contributing factor.
"What kind of metals do you want pumped into your local town's water supply?" Mercury. It's liquid so it should flow through pretty easy. Unlike Alice's rigidity theory, you do not want the water (or in this case, the metal) in the pipes to be rigid, obviously.
3:50 Blue Origin wanted to do the whole „space as a amusement park“ thing, you don‘t get any NASA money or support for that. SpaceX did the whole „we will bring useful shit to space“ and NASA needs that, so you get big government contracts (not just from NASA) and NASA will share engineering expertise with you.
That's more virgin galactic (lol Virgin virgin galactic, vs Chad SpaceX). Seriously virgin galactic is just a lame suborbital space plane. Blue origin tho wants to bring useful stuff into space but while it's do or die every time SpaceX tries anything (they'd go bankrupt without NASA contracts) Blue origin has fuck you sugar daddy Amazon money funding it while their useful rockets are forever down the pipeline.
@Andrew McFadden Not sure what the particular relationship is between NASA expertise and SpaceX expertise but it's hard for me to imagine that SpaceX would've advanced as quickly as they have without substantial knowledge transfer from both NASA and the contractors like Boeing and Lockheed that NASA traditionally works with. The reason SpaceX can take risks and blow up things is they're not hobbled by politics. NASA hardly builds rockets, but the one rocket they are developing is the massive SLS rocket that will be used for upcoming manned lunar missions. They were specifically required by Congress though to re-use parts from the Space Shuttle program in order to keep the same contractors on-board. SpaceX is more free to try to design things from scratch that might be better and one real way in which SpaceX seems to innovate is in being open to building cheap prototypes they can then blow up and use to collect data from rather than designing everything to work from day one as NASA tries to do.
@@unknownPLfan Falcons are decent rockets if you ignore the gimmicky landing thing, and strapping three first stages together for a big load is easy. I still think that SpaceX might as well be nationalized and absorbed into NASA, though. Considering how much the apartheid billionaire screws up it’s a wonder he’s not been able to fuck with it more than he has everything else.
The bridge collapse wasn't haunting enough to warn about before it happened, unlike the Silver Bridge in 1967. Don't get me wrong, people died in this collapse, it just wasn't spooky enough for Ol' Red Eyes to show up.
Chlorine gas reacts with water to create hydrochloric acid. So when you breathe it in, acid forms in your lungs and melts them from the inside. Isn't chemistry fun?
I have a friend who previously worked at the wastewater utility of a decent-sized American city. When giving me a tour of the works, he mentioned that they transitioned from chlorine to UV sterilization for their effluent. This change was made as a risk-avoidance measure, since UV sterilizers don't require transportation and storage of a chemical weapon in a metropolitan area.
@@scorinth The Space Shuttle program as a whole was an utter failure. Its primary objective was to make getting into orbit cheaper, but it did the exact opposite while holding NASA back for decades.
@@Iknowtoomuchable eh, the first often fails. But it was the first to fly re-usable engines and land like a plane. It lead to future, more efficient reusables like the X-37 (and whatever else the Air Force currently has). Buran’s design was a bit more logical- keeping the main engines off the orbiter, but of course, the Energia booster wasn’t reusable.
This is so true. In disasters and true crime, you know shit's gonna happen when you hear a day of the week, specific date, and then time of day makes you stop what you're doing to really pay attention. 😮🍍
My city uses clams to supplement water quality sensors because they can detect even very low concentrations of contaminants. They glue a magnet to them so they can detect when they close. If enough clams close the system notifies staff. I don't think they add any metals, but in one of the water treatment facilities in my city they stopped adding chlorine and reduced the dosage of dichlorine monoxide after it was upgraded to include ozone treatment and activated charcoal filtration.
I just realized that I thought a 1 hour 15 minute podcast was like an abridged version (Pun intended) since I've gotten so used to pushing 3 hours. Also from that angle Bezos space ship looks like one of those capsule corp spaceships from Dragonball Z
accelerated bridge construction is absolutely awesome when its replacing bridges over the interstate on sunday morning between 1:15 and 5:45am using four cranes and all the parts but the wet-deck are ready for bolting and welding off to the side...
While you’re on Melbourne bridges and cable-stays, honourable mention to the nearby Westgate bridge, which dropped a segment of road deck during construction on to the canteen below. Grim.
As he told it, my grandfather was the person who broke the news to the architect. He went down to the pub shortly after hearing it on the radio and asked the guy next to him whether he'd heard that the Westgate had collapsed, and the dude apparently went white as a sheet and nearly fainted.
It killed many of the workers taking their lunch break at the time, which reinforces the message of the Quebec Bridge episode - that you should never let your workers take a break.
when you said "speaking of tacky rgb" I was terrified you were gonna say the sunshine skyway bridge, which (i think) is a cable stayed bridge that I grew up about a half a mile away from. they recently put some gamer lights on it
Fun fact: on one of their road trips, WTYP crew once replaced a well's chlorine tank with a glitter tank and pumped it into a town's water supply which turned everyone fabulous for months.
You typically use ozone instead of chlorine. The disadvantage with ozone is that water can get contaminated in the pipes after treatment and there are no trace amounts of ozone to kill pathogens. There are typically trace amounts of chlorine.
I attended FIU 2016-2019 so I was there for it all.. it was a crazy time.. and I worked for the engineering department specifically the Civil engineering department on the accelerated bridge contsruction program in 2019 during the legal case....that was interesting.. Yea them talking about how hard it would be being drunk at 3am to cross those lanes is why they wanted the bridge. So many kids have died crossing the road bc people can't drive down here.
Your safety third segment reminded me of a story. I was working in a health lab. I guy from the municipal water shop brought me a water sample. "Could you test this for chlorine?", he asks. "Sure, just leave it on the counter." Later, I test the sample with my magic chemicals. Nothing - contains no chlorine. I think about this a little bit and decide to dilute it 100 to 1. The sample turns blood red. I dilute it a 10000 to one and finally obtain a reportable result. I call the water shop, "What's with that water sample you left me?" "Ahh, we had a little problem."
If you're using the lower flange of the I-beam as the walkway, you're going to introduce a twisting moment due to the load; when class ends and a few tens of students are walking all at once you're going to have a force that an I-beam is specifically _not_ good at.
There is one reinforced concrete truss bridge in the United States - the McMillin Bridge in Pierce County, Washington. It was built in 1934 and is no longer used for vehicular traffic. On the subject of “design/build,” MCM was the design/build contractor, but they hired Figg Engineering to do the design. On the subject of urban design, the highway (US 41) was there first. When FIU was founded, in the 1960s, Sweetwater was still a small town and the traffic on the highway was undoubtedly much less. Student housing was placed across the highway only recently.
There is a pedestrian bridge in the middle of the campus of TU Dresden. It links the Audimax (German Latin from "auditorium maximum", basically the building containing the biggest lecture hall on campus) to the deceptively named "Neue Mensa" ("new dining hall") which is actually a couple decades old and was used as temporary refugee housing as it was deemed no longer fit for service as a dining hall. However, this bridge does not cross eleventy billion lanes of traffic but either one or two per direction. If you want to look it up on google, search for the bus stop "Technische Universität" of line 66.
damn i was a student here when this happened and somehow when i started watching this pod I knew this episode was coming, half with dread and half with anticipation
The school mascot for the Metropolitan State University of Denver is the "Road Runner". Not named after the bird but because as an urban college in its early days, the facilities were originally scattered among different downtown buildings and the students were often running in traffic to get to and from classes. The city eventually demolished an adjacent low-income neighborhood and built a dedicated campus - Yay Urban Renewal!
I can't imagine anything that would fit in better with the Schuylkill River's classical masonry and industrial bridge aesthetic than a pair of extremely modernist starchitect flair obelisks
Oh God I'm gonna be the comment guy. #1 I'm always happy to hear my dear hometown of New Orleans mentioned. We're a good lesson in having engineering problems and surviving in spite of them. One clarification: the Sewerage and Water Board pumps are more than a century old. They go offline at times because they are old and need new parts; all twenty-something of them and the power plant that feeds them are incredibly machine-specific. When it works it it a marvel of engineering. When it fails it can be a disaster-- forget hurricanes, a high tide on the Mississippi and lake coupled with heavy rainfall will test them to the limit, and thus the city can flood. New Orleans survived Katrina's direct hit (see the Mississippi Gulf Coast for eyewall damage). Katrina breached the the levee. Well, multiple levees. I live nearby the regional Army Corps of Engineers HQ so I try to tell myself it's safe here, but then again they are the folks in charge of that fiasco. It's worthy of an episode for sure. Also Hand Grenades are disgusting. Get a Sazerac (America's first cocktail) instead. Love y'all.
Traditional water treatment uses chlorine, bromine or iodine. Beyond the low cost, the relative cleanliness of the water can easily be determined by the presence of chemical residuals. Other solutions such as UV and Ozone require the water be tested for the presence of individual or groups of pathogens to ensure effectiveness.
The benefit of chlorine treatment is the residual so that the water in the pipes still remain drinkable for longer and prevents biologicals from forming in the pipes
You joke, but Sacramento, CA literally raised the city by a story to deal with flooding. They just built the roads up another floor and abandoned the lower floor. There is currently a tour where you can tour the old streetfronts under the streets.
In reference to safer alternatives to chlorine gas: most water utilities use chlorine for disinfection. The difference is which form you use. Gaseous chlorine is the cheapest, oldest, and most effective form, but also the most dangerous to handle. The most common form used today is liquid chlorine (sodium hypochlorite). It’s safer, but also less potent (typically 12% to 18% concentration, compared to nearly 100% for the gas) and more expensive to buy and transport. A third option is solid chlorine (calcium hypochlorite), which is sold as pucks. To use it, you put the pucks in a machine that sprays them with water until enough dissolves into a mixing tank to get the correct concentration, and the solution is then injected into the drinking water. This is good because you don’t have to haul a big, sloshing tank of liquid or dangerous gas cylinder, but the trade-off is that you have to operate and maintain the tablet-dissolving machine.
To add to that, UV can also be used for disinfection, but that's more for very small systems (e.g. a church) where the pipes aren't going back underground after the UV light. A large community water system /might/ have a UV light in addition to chlorine, but they won't exclusively rely on UV for disinfection
Just so's you knows, the Bolte Bridge is pronounced "Boltee". Also, the next bridge along on the same river, the West Gate Bridge, would make an excellent episode in itself - it collapsed during construction, killing 35 workers, and exposing the serious gaps in safety and labour laws of the time.
Part of the bit that fell down is outside the entrance to the Engineering Department at Monash Uni, the Engineering School that the lead Engineer didn't graduate from that was Melbourne Uni.
We absolutely need an episode on the West Gate. Even after its construction it's been surrounded by death. Being a kid in Melbourne in the 00s, I remember the strong association of that bridge with suicide, and being absolutely shaken by the murder of Darcey Freeman.
An alternative to Chlorine in water disinfection is Sodium Hypochlorite, commonly known as bleach. Your typical household bleach is about 6.5% concentrate. Sodium Hypochlorite (often referred to as Hypo in the biz) is around 12.5%-15% in concentration. The nice thing about Hypo is that at ambient temperature it is a liquid, thus solving (2) issues that Chlorine can propose. Those being: 1) Chlorine is a gas at ambient temperature and can thus easily enter operators lungs causing permanent damage and 2) being a liquid it easily visible given a leak. Additionally, since most people are aware of bleach they are aware of what bleach smells like thus making it all the much easier to detect a leak. The only thing that sucks about working with Hypo is that it bleaches your clothes when working around it making it look like you don't know how to do laundry. Also hypo can eat through your clothes. Reference: I worked for a GC and we upgraded a Chlorine gas disinfection system to a Sodium Hypochlorite System. Pretty cool project actually.
Phoenix is absolutely filled with this type of stroad in combination with an afterthought of a bike & ped infrastructure. When I saw the pictures I thought it easily could be anywhere in suburban Phoenix metro. It really is the Florida of the desert out here.
They're replacing this failed bridge with a standard cable stayed design if anyone was curious. They're also doing full road closures for all work over the roadway.
I've been watching your podcast for awhile now. A "Shake Hands With Danger" safety video came up in my recommended videos. It was some of the most anxiety laden 23 minutes of my life.
As a former sunshine state resident, tamiami is pronounced like first part of tampa and second part of Miami. So like rhymes with Tammy. Second, very few residential houses have basements because running a pump 24/7/365 would be stupid even for Florida Man.
12:13 This, so much. I swear to God I just want a beige box PC with modern specs, no lights, no gimmicks. I built my PC deliberately with as few lights as possible but they still crept in and it is very annoying. Anyways, happy pride month! |🏳️🌈
There is a bike tunnel under the Elbe in Hamburg. When they put all the shipyards on the south bank in the 19th century, getting all the workers commuting in and out of work with ferries every day became a huge river traffic problem. Building a bridge that doesn't block cargo ships would have been too expensive, so they made a tunnel. You actually can take cars through it, but it's almost entirely used by pedestrians and bikes. It still has the original 1911 look, which is very cool.
Woo! A disaster that I actually heard happen live. I worked about a half mile east of it, and was on my lunch break. From the distance it was just a loud thud. I can't remember. I think I may have suggested this one in a comment way back, but yeah, there was a lot of incompetence that led to this happening. Another terribly planned fuck up down here, was when they added express lanes to the interstate, but put terribly confusing signs leading in to them, so people would panic and swerve to get in/get out right before they started. I have no idea how many fatalities this caused, but there were a ton of high speed accidents. Checking online, an article says the split at one spot on I-95 is still the deadliest stretch of road in Florida.
Howdy! Second generation UCF grad here (my dad was in one of the first graduating classes after the name change). You could definitely do a WTYP on the never-ending growth of UCF's campuses.
Any chance you guys could cover the Marchioness disaster? Happened in London, August 1989. Two boats collided on the Thames, one a pleasure boat sank within 30 seconds, the other which had a drunk/hungover captain just carried on sailing. There was a massive coverup and hostility from the thatcher government towards the victims and their families.
"Tammy Yammy." The first roadway from Tampa to Miami. Around 1920 there was this French guy who went to the Everglades, looked around, and decided, "Now this here is prime development land!!!" He took over a failed earlier cross-Florida road project to build a road from Naples, Florida to Miami, Florida. Between these two towns is seventy-five miles, non-stop, of the most unspeakable swamp. I once waded a total of a quarter-mile through it to set a property corner, the mosquitoes nearly bled me white. The construction crew built a raised roadbed across seventy-five miles of it, using 1920s construction equipment and lots and lots of dynamite. Quite a bit more than seventy-five miles, in fact. A little while later the French guy also went bankrupt and construction, about halfway to Miami, halted. Then along came a Yankee advertising man named Collier, who bought a bunch of real estate near Naples. He bankrolled the completion, on the condition that the State of Florida should create a new county and name it after him! So they did that, but then he decided that he wanted the whole road to be in Collier County, so they abandoned a 25-mile-long section of already-built roadway in neighboring Monroe County and built a new twenty-mile section to the North.
Just for reference, for anyone who sees this, the alternatives to chlorine in water treatment would be UV sterilisation or Ozone injection. The reason these are more expensive is that they both require a lot of electricity on-site, whereas chlorine is a mass-produced industrial chemical and you don't need much of it to sterilise water. There may also be other options, but I'm no expert on this
I used to cross in the middle of the street to go to college too and there was an island with lots of trees in the middle, plus the street curved there, but I always took it upon myself to avoid cars because I've always assumed that other people in cars are a) idiots and b) actually trying to hit me. I would use the crosswalk if I was particularly drunk though, but I always found that to be more dangerous because there was at least a small expectation that cars would stop as they were supposed to but I'd rather trust my own two eyes than driving conventions to keep me safe while walking. The biggest danger at my college was the high winds that were all too often a feature and I had to walk through this area to get back to my apartment where the buildings where stupidly built so that they created a narrowing area exactly in the direction from whence the winds would always come. Even though the buildings never got terribly close together, the increase in wind speed because they were creating this funnel between them was noticeable. One evening, I had been in the pub studying for a midterm in molecular biology I had the next day. I was studying in the pub instead of at my apartment because I found that as soon as other students realized that I did rather well on the tests, they'd want to study with me. I prefer to study alone but I discovered that everyone would buy me beer if I studied with them so that's what I did before every test. The winds were calm when we started studying and, since I had nothing better to do, I helped anyone who showed up at the pub and they all bought me beers and I was there drinking for quite a few hours whilst helping people study. When my fellow classmates were finally all gone, I finished my beer and realized that the wind had picked up in that time and was now blowing at least 50-60 mph, which is what tends to happen in that area. When I got outside into the wind, I realized how utterly soused I was from all the beers people had bought me and that my large backpack was acting like a sail, trying to push me forward. At least it was blowing in the direction I needed to walk to get to my apartment but I was really drunk and the wind was blowing me faster than I could walk... so I decided to start running! This turned out to be extra awesome because the wind was blowing me something like ten feet for every step because I was running and therefore not just shifting my weight from one foot to the other while trying to keep one foot on the ground at all times. I did use the crosswalk that time because just the fact that it was so fun to be blown along the path whilst running in the wind made me think that I might be too drunk to cross in the middle of the road, plus the wind had a tendency to blow big branches down from the trees and there were a lot of trees in the median island where I would stop before crossing the second half of the road. That went fine because it was getting late and so there were no cars for me to trust to stop for the light while I crossed on the crosswalk. I thought for sure that I would probably fall down running in the wind on the uneven sidewalk on the other side of the street but that went fine too. I had a sickening hangover the next day so I struggled not to erase my pencil writing from my sweaty hungover hands during the test the next day, but I did get a B+ on the test (although I would normally get an A had I not been so hungover).
I spent 10+ years at FIU as a student and then-employee in their facilities department. The state process of forcing to accept the lowest bid contracts have resulted in cheaper and cheaper buildings. FIU's president, Mark Rosenberg, has been obsessed for a decade now with rapidly expanding the university despite the lack of public transit and walkable spaces. The university expanded (and swallowed up) the neighboring municipality Sweetwater, to which the bridge was connecting to. The locksmiths at FIU would always complain about how these contractors would do such shitty and cheap work. They'd always mess up installing door frames, so the facilities dept at the uni couldn't even install the doors properly without needing the contractors to return and fix their mess. I recall this happening in one of the recently built medical buildings on campus next to the site of the bridge. It always seemed like a matter of time before here would be an incident.
And it all loops back. I started to listening to engineering youtube channels because of this collapse. That led me to Roz's donoteat, and the start of all this. Yay Liam! Boo capitalism!
I've watched like half a dozen videos from different channels about this bridge and Justin is the first one I've seen who actually pointed out that the visual reason the truss is angled the way it is, is to give the illusion it lines up with the faux stays on the roof
As a Melburnian, I must correct you on your pronunciation, it is pronounced the 'Bolt E Bridge'. Which is actually better for this. Rename it to be the Bolt E-bridge and make it a full gamer bridge. Was totally caught off guard by the Bolte being mentioned though. When I was a kid I did think the towers were totally aesthetic.
@@atn_holdings I've lived in Victoria my whole life and I have never ever heard it pronounced like that. The bridge is named after Henry Bolte, whose surname is pronounced 'bolty'. There are many videos about him from the time he was alive and shortly after his death that pronounce his name this way. It definitely is not pronounced 'bolt-uh'.
"What if we bring the bridge back to the previous condition where it was fine?" Oh yeah, let's treat the problem like loading a System Restore Point to fix Windows. Should patch that concrete just fine.
Lol "Make the roads smaller and slower". You're kidding, right? Maybe in some alternate universe.
make the roads smaller and slower.
see also: our traffic engineering episode ua-cam.com/video/8oq0u2i4iHc/v-deo.html&ab_channel=donoteat01
If they can do it with American minds they can do it with American roads.
In an alternate universe where the roads are better? Yes
Short and sweet, but rather bland. 5/10
If the US wouldn't have become so stupidly car dependent we could have smaller and slower roads
Well There's Your Problem | Episode 72: The Amazon Space Capsule
Holy crap luke, you watch these?! This is crazy. Collab when lmao
Inshallah
Inshallah
FINGERS CROSSED!
Inshallah!
I highly, highly recommend checking out the NTSB report on this, I've never seen an angrier post-incident report. Special shout out to the mentioned 'back-of-the-envelope' calculations being shown literally fitting on the back of an envelope.
Yeah, the NTSB report is fantastic. My wife works as a project manager designing roadways and bridges, she has all her interns and new staff watch the NTSB summary of the collapse together. It's always interesting to hear the youngster's answers to the question, "so who was primarily responsible?".
There's so many things that went wrong with the FIU bridge. So many systems which were meant to catch a dangerous design were deliberately circumvented or ignored. Regrettably, that exact kind of corner-curtting happens on _every_ public works project. There's constant pressure to do things like skip the peer review, argue the DOT into submission, or make your design exempt from the typical reviews to save time and money.
Agreed. NTSB/CSB reports are supposed to be impartial, that's the whole point, they can't even be used in a court of law. But you can tell that whoever wrote that one was genuinely, genuinely seething about what happened. It was actually refreshing to be reminded that behind the almost empathy-less reports (again, that's not what they are for), it is still a human being(s).
For the record, the back-of-the-envelope thing is on the illustrated digest (SPC-20-02). Don't be like me, who, being a certified moron, tried to search through the entire accident report (NTSB/HAR-19/02) for the word "envelope"...
That being said, the board member statement by Landsberg gave me the distinct feeling that he wanted to violently shake and strangle someone at FIGG, Louis Berger, MCM, Bolton Perez, FDOT, and/or FIU.
I checked it out and damn:
"When the inevitable began to happen a creeping, catastrophic material failure, nobody did anything, despite what NTSB Chairman Sumwalt accurately described as the “bridge screaming at everyone that it was failing.” Why? Once the cracking became evident, not one of the organizations involved was willing to take the essential and unpopular step to call a halt and close the road."
At some point the special untested design process needs to conduct meetings underneath the bridge! XD
"Florida was a mistake." As a born and raised Floridian, I have to say: being a backwater, statewide retirement home built on limestone, swamp muck, and loose sand only just above sea level and in the direct path of some of the most frequent and severe weather patterns with all state government bending over backwards for Disney's corporate whims at the explicit expense of the citizens doesn't make us a mistake. We are "The Greatest Mistake of America". From civil rights to city planning to pandemic response to public transportation, there isn't a goddamn thing we haven't completely fucked up, and as such, you will refer to our godforsaken, fetid cesspool by its proper title. Thank you.
Wildlife is cool tho. Manatees rock.
You forgot Narco financed
I visited Florida a good many years ago. I realised that, in Florida, every negative stereotype about America is true. Big roads to carry the big cars to carry the big, fat people who waddle from parking lot to store, and return with carts loaded with sugar and fat. A flag on every building, and a church on every street. The people seemed nice enough though, once you realise they are so adjusted to their strange world that it all feels normal to them.
Born and raised just south of Tampa. I love so much about this state and all that it's had to offer. But for nearly 100 years everything about it is being exploited and destroyed.
Also the Fetishizing I hear people talk about Desantis worries the fuck out of me.
At least their pandemic response was superior to NY and CA…
"What are we here for? We're here to do a podcast."
"So let... let's do that."
'We are going put lbs of tension on it.'
"The engineers weren't very concerned."
*looks at how much of the episode is left*
They fucking should be.
Did Roz say a specific date? Then _worry._
@@williamchamberlain2263 Additional: Did Roz say a specific *time*? Then get scared.
@@voxdelumine7491 Roz stating a specific time is basically equivalent to Kenshiro telling you you're already dead
God, as a person with a disability (not in a wheelchair but mobility is hard) these overpasses are genuinely very difficult to handle, painful and add WAY more time to your trip.
Sympathies.
What works better?
I'm genuinely ignorant. I mean, American city design just SUUUUCKS because it's designed for you to strap on a car.
@@grmpEqweer that's the big problem, yeah, cities have been built for cars and not pedestrians, and especially not in consideration of pedestrians with mobility challenges. With things as they are it's hard to see a solution, but I'm also not an expert on urban design or anything.
@@goosiesmoosies Most of the pedestrian overpasses in my city have ramps shaped like corkscrews at either end, rather than stairs, which everyone uses: walkers, cyclists, wheelchair users. Of course many of them are still blocks from anywhere you might be coming from, or going to.
They are a fucking disaster. Wtyp is right on the money here. Overpass shouldn't exist. There should be a continuous sidewalk on a traffic calmed street and cars shouldn't be traveling at great speeds inside areas where pedestrians are.
I no I have a chronic illness and stairs are hard
Ah, yes the Florida pedestrian bridge. A bridge engineering disaster on top of a highway engineering disaster.
I like how the media tried to latch on to the Accelerated Bridge Construction for a scapegoat. Meanwhile, engineers across the country were like "They tried to make a truss bridge out of WHAT??"
"Can you cut this last bit out so I sound smart?"
"No."
I can relate to that exchange so well.
“Eat pant” - Bort Smap
“Go pant” - Alse Kuwd-Cal
Pog
@@tibbygaycat "pg" - Erk nils
"We're here to do a podcast..." *7 seconds of dead air*
That's what I'm here for.
I genuinely thought my phone crashed. That was a good meta-joke!! 😆
this showed up to me as Well There's Your Problem | Episode 71: Florida
Well There's Your Problem | Episode 72: The United States
All we needed was a thumbnail with a side-by-side of its Governors (e.g. De Santis, Jeb Bush, Rick Scott, etc.)
Honestly, that would be a great episode. It's an entire state built at sea level and on swamp land.
@@isgonrain Episode 73: Britain
As a former resident of the Sunshine State, yeah, that's it in a nutshell.
"design that looks like it's load-bearing, but is actually just ornamental" feels like the equivalent of a putting a ferrari-chassi on a bad car. It's only impressive to people who will glance at it for a second.
It seems silly to try to flex with a bridge-design (ostensibly to show how skilled you are at engineering) when actual engineers know that what "looks high-tech and complicated" is basically just a painted-on racing stripe.
It sorta defeats the purpose of a statement-piece if the main function of the "statement" is to pretend to be a well-integrated, functional part that also looks nice, when it's actually just all looks, and functionally superfluous.
If this was interior-design, that kind of approach to form would probably be perceived as "tacky", "gauche" or even camp.
Everything wants stuff to look impressive, and yet they fail to build it out of big stone blocks. The fools.
Grover House & Load bearing drywall
@@twothreebravo I remember watching that episode (I've watched it several times) and I get that a lot of the "solutions" are sorta eccentric, and definitely something a person without any architecture or engineering-background would do, but I think some of the critiques in that bonus-episode was a little "over-stated".
Sure, not accommodating the full depth of your fridge so it sticks out awkwardly is a real blunder - especially since it should be fairly easy to fix, unless the back of your fridge is pushed out due to a weird dimension of the wall behind it - but the exterior of the house sorta struck me as "generic american house design".
It was clowned on a bit in the episode, but - and maybe I'm kinda shading a lot of contemporary american house designs - but to me the exterior of that house just read like "sure, that's an american house-exterior."
Very little - if any - of american house-architecture seems to feel bound by the kind of restraint (or "historical call-back") that you would find in european countries.
And if an american were to self-consciously try to imitate - for example - 19th century peasant architecture, it would probably just feel as arbitrary and "unreal" as the neighboring McMansion (there was that story a year or so ago of a rich american sinking an enormous amount of money to build a 14-16th century european wine-country-castle, and despite probably being extremely accurate, it just came across as nervously fumbling for historical prestige).
I think because the US is sorta unique in it's culture of "new nation, no old rules, we'll make it up as we go along" I feel like at least the exterior of Grover House is more or less indistinguishable from the wildly hodge-podge, constantly clashing approach to design that is american home-architecture.
None of the exterior of Grover House struck me as outlandish in the context of a country that has McMansions that look like they are made out of spray-painted foam-bricks, and chain-restaurants that has this very peculiar "neo-brutalist shoe-box" shapes (low, wide brick-buildings with no exterior details outside a few windows and a big company sign over the main entry).
Actually you have it a little backwards with the car analogy, having a Ferrari chassis under a shitty looking car would result in a really well performing car that looks like dogshit
What you're looking for is putting a Ferrari body on a shitty chassis, that way it looks pretty but actually performs like dogshit.
:)
@@TrashHeapCustodian That's what I meant; when I said chassi I was thinking of the word as it's being used for computer cases, so the outermost exterior of an object.
I am not a car guy.
Alice going "Aww" is heartwarming and vastly underappreciated.
She's a treasure
we love her dont we folks
@@maean7410 Yay alice
@@DaL33T5 yay alice
26:58 for those looking
Jeff Bezos is going into space.
Unfortunately, he's coming back.
Perhaps it'll be a Challenging trip.
Assuming the rocket doesn't blow up on the launch pad ofc. We can only hope. Does Amazon's rockets have the same failure rate as Musk's?
Also unfortunately, he hasn't managed to bait Musk into trying to race him there.
@@SadisticSenpai61 Don't forget that he's dragging his brother into this, so it isn't just him and a pilot.
@@MrJohndoakes Fair, but honestly? Still not gonna mourn if something happens.
May I suggest an episode on the 1992 Guadalajara explosions? Galvanic corrosion caused a leak in a gasoline pipeline which leaked into the sewer causing an enormous explosion that blew up the roads.
Contractor-“Okay cool we got the self cracking concrete done as requested”
Figg-“You mean self cleaning?”
C-“What?”
Figg-“What?”
"What are we here for? We're here to do a podcast..."
*uncomfortably long silence*
"So, let's do that..."
Thought my internet crapped out again
What a vibe
@@jas6388 It’s our vibe
Either Justin has a template script that he fills in with the current story, or he has an amazing memory to remember always using the same phrases. After a couple dozen episodes, you can narrate the exact phrases of the early and late parts of the episode. :D
Justin: "Okay, so I thought a good place to start -"
Everyone: "WOULD BE TO ASK: WHAT IS A BRIDGE?!"
He got it wrong this time though, it should just be "what is bridge?" 😜
The amount of hate and misogyny I have seen being spread by people who falsely believe that either "it was a female lead engineer" or "it was an all female-led team" is frankly upsetting on multipe levels. I wish we, as a society, could educate these people with the help of a focused burst of energy... to the face... in a closed fist formation.
> upsetting on multipe levels
Its all upsetting, but at street level now.
@@TheReedsofEnki Ok, you get an upvote.
But i dont like it
I might be wrong but I have vague memories of reading comments like those, looking up info about the company that built the bridge and finding out they were owned by libertarians or something who had a bunch of financial ties to the Florida Republican party.
shit like this is so funny because as someone who actually consistently interacted with students studying civil engineering its obvious that gender has absolutely no bearing on general competence. these idiots just cant handle the fact that some women are doing better things than them
New to the internet, champ?
Can confirm the annoyingness of being disabled and using a pedestrian bridge. The bus I take home from school stops on the other side of 7 lanes of traffic, and using the ramps to cross the pedestrian bridge, which is a relatively small bridge adds about an extra 500m to the walk. The bus is scheduled to arrive a very short amount of time after I get out of school, about 10 minutes, and the stop is about a 10 minute walk from the school when using the stairs on the bridge. When using my forearm crutches, which can do stairs but it's annoying and takes forever, taking the ramp is the better option, but that extra walk means I can't make that bus and end up waiting 30-45 minutes because my city doesn't really run Busses more frequently than that. I haven't used a wheelchair on this particular bridge, but the ramps in my school are too steep to wheel yourself up or down, if the ramps on a pedestrian bridge are designed like that and you don't have someone to push you, they're about as accessible as stairs.
@4:40 "I do like that his midlife crisis, instead of being like a Corvette or a 9/11..."
Cue 5 minutes of me trying to think if 9/11 was Dubya's midlife crisis, Osama's, maybe the hijackers???? Before finally realizing you meant a Porsche.
I don't know cars, so I had no idea that meant a Porsche until I read your comment, lol.
The Gamer Bridge yells racial slurs whenever a minority is on it.
Below the bridge hangs a row of carefully-tuned wind chimes and funnels, so every breeze cries out 'gaaaaaay....'
It closes itself off and sounds an alarm whenever a woman passes within 10 meters of it.
Having gone over the Bolte during rush hour with my racist dad driving, I think it is indeed the gamer bridge.
@@Leeqzombie Your parent too? My mother does that. Outside of the car, no overt racism ever displayed. Works aside people of all races, no issues at all. But put her behind the wheel and suddenly that changes - every time another drives acts poorly on the road she will try to get a look into their cab and unleash some disparaging comment about their race or, if the driver is white, their assumed immigrant status.
on the UA-cam home page the title popped up as "Well There's Your Problem: Florida..." but that would be an inhumanly long episode
Nice, my university finally gets an episode. Was at the campus when this happened and I drove under that thing to get to class nearly every day.
Looks like you shook hands with danger.
The Grim Reaper was sitting ontop of the pylon and said "not today"
Walked across it after a 4am flex a month before...😬😬😬
Please add Molybdenum to my water supply. If I’m going out, I want to go out with as many adorable mispronunciations from medical staff in my ears as possible.
I measured the seven corners pedestrian bridge. If you're a wheelchair user next to the stairs on one side and want to get to the stairs on the other side (200ft/60m away), you have to go 1500ft/460m to take the ramp path Justin described
I'm fairly sure there's provision in the 1964 Civil Rights Act for this :)
I really like your podcast. It is hard to find true geeks that have radio quality voices. I have an M.A.Sc. in structural design and have been practicing for more than 30 years. I also own my own structural consulting firm. I spent way too much time looking at this incident.
The post tensioning and reinforcing was essentially a steel bridge with concrete cast over it. There are some examples of concrete trusses. The ones I know of are all prestressed (post-tensioning is actually just of form of pre-stressing). There is less maintenance with concrete. Steel has to be painted on a regular basis especially when it is close to the ocean. That was the idea with the titanium dioxide additive in the concrete to make it self cleaning. The main motivation was to reduce the cost of overall maintenance. Heavy structures also tend to also do better in high winds such as hurricanes. So it was not an irrational decision to make the bridge out of concrete. This incident will probably stop engineers from making the same decision to use concrete trusses but there actually is a place for them (just not a common place).
The funky shape was not an issue. It really came down to a simple design flaw. Interface shear is checked on a regular basis in most concrete structures. It only takes a few minutes to calculate the shear stress at the joint. The level of stress should have indicated that the interface shear would be difficult to justify and that the shear area and amount of steel should have been increased.
Louis Berger (and any engineer that works with concrete) would know what interface shear was and how to calculate the interface shear resistance. Louis Berger had the technical ability to do the check properly, they just didn't meet the guidelines with the project requirements which is different than saying that they weren't qualified. It is common practice for all major structures to have concept reviews. That is not special to this project. The scope of the concept review was actually reduced to save money, which is actually more unusual. The reduction of scope of the concept review could potentially be considered a contributing factor.
"What kind of metals do you want pumped into your local town's water supply?"
Mercury. It's liquid so it should flow through pretty easy. Unlike Alice's rigidity theory, you do not want the water (or in this case, the metal) in the pipes to be rigid, obviously.
make the water more rigid!!!!
@@ilicythings ice
his fail brother is like "Mom said you have to take me to space with you"
You can actually HEAR the excitement in Alice's voice when she heard the phrase
"concrete is pretty rigid"
😍
3:50 Blue Origin wanted to do the whole „space as a amusement park“ thing, you don‘t get any NASA money or support for that.
SpaceX did the whole „we will bring useful shit to space“ and NASA needs that, so you get big government contracts (not just from NASA) and NASA will share engineering expertise with you.
That's more virgin galactic (lol Virgin virgin galactic, vs Chad SpaceX). Seriously virgin galactic is just a lame suborbital space plane.
Blue origin tho wants to bring useful stuff into space but while it's do or die every time SpaceX tries anything (they'd go bankrupt without NASA contracts) Blue origin has fuck you sugar daddy Amazon money funding it while their useful rockets are forever down the pipeline.
@Andrew McFadden Not sure what the particular relationship is between NASA expertise and SpaceX expertise but it's hard for me to imagine that SpaceX would've advanced as quickly as they have without substantial knowledge transfer from both NASA and the contractors like Boeing and Lockheed that NASA traditionally works with. The reason SpaceX can take risks and blow up things is they're not hobbled by politics. NASA hardly builds rockets, but the one rocket they are developing is the massive SLS rocket that will be used for upcoming manned lunar missions. They were specifically required by Congress though to re-use parts from the Space Shuttle program in order to keep the same contractors on-board. SpaceX is more free to try to design things from scratch that might be better and one real way in which SpaceX seems to innovate is in being open to building cheap prototypes they can then blow up and use to collect data from rather than designing everything to work from day one as NASA tries to do.
@@unknownPLfan Falcons are decent rockets if you ignore the gimmicky landing thing, and strapping three first stages together for a big load is easy. I still think that SpaceX might as well be nationalized and absorbed into NASA, though. Considering how much the apartheid billionaire screws up it’s a wonder he’s not been able to fuck with it more than he has everything else.
Too bad Floridian Mothman didn’t warn everyone of this bridge collapse.
That's just Florida Man, though.
The bridge collapse wasn't haunting enough to warn about before it happened, unlike the Silver Bridge in 1967.
Don't get me wrong, people died in this collapse, it just wasn't spooky enough for Ol' Red Eyes to show up.
skunk ape did his best
@@Smazzie He must have gotten lost on the way
Mothman was run over trying to cross the 12 lanes of traffic to get there
Chlorine gas reacts with water to create hydrochloric acid. So when you breathe it in, acid forms in your lungs and melts them from the inside. Isn't chemistry fun?
It forms hydrochloric acid AND a more active form of bleach. So even more fun :D
@Blaire Sovereign chlorine gas burns the lungs *because* it turns into hydrochloric acid inside the lungs.
@Blaire Sovereign the cl reacts with the water in your lungs releasing heat and creating hcl.
So that's why people say it burns when they get a whiff of chlorine
@@IndustrialParrot2816 Yup, just the reaction of the gas with the moisture inside your nostril is like huffing HCl.
I have a friend who previously worked at the wastewater utility of a decent-sized American city. When giving me a tour of the works, he mentioned that they transitioned from chlorine to UV sterilization for their effluent. This change was made as a risk-avoidance measure, since UV sterilizers don't require transportation and storage of a chemical weapon in a metropolitan area.
When is the Space shuttle episode going to happen?? It's got everything! government oversight, international conflict, death, success.
See, the problem is that "success" part...
@@scorinth The Space Shuttle program as a whole was an utter failure. Its primary objective was to make getting into orbit cheaper, but it did the exact opposite while holding NASA back for decades.
@@Iknowtoomuchable eh, the first often fails. But it was the first to fly re-usable engines and land like a plane. It lead to future, more efficient reusables like the X-37 (and whatever else the Air Force currently has). Buran’s design was a bit more logical- keeping the main engines off the orbiter, but of course, the Energia booster wasn’t reusable.
Most folks know about Apollo 13? And the challenger but are unaware of the deaths of workers and test pilots. Really gruesome stuff.
yeah no thats cool but I want an ep based on the book Hubble Wars
"Accelerated bridge construction" shoulda just gone with a Bailey Bridge.
Officer: "Do you know why I pulled you over?"
Engineer: "No!"
Officer: "You're going 65 constructing this bridge when the speed limit is 50"
Nothing like doing an accelerated construction bridge over the Ebro but it's 1938 and the italian bombers are trying to kill you
Big Structural Bailey ftw
@@blackvulture6818 but this time it's Miami Florida and you can't have any lane closures
The concatenated version of the title was "Episode 71: Florida..." which... idk, could be an episode.
concatenated with what
You can always tell things are going to start getting bad when Justin starts mentioning specific times of day.
This is so true. In disasters and true crime, you know shit's gonna happen when you hear a day of the week, specific date, and then time of day makes you stop what you're doing to really pay attention. 😮🍍
My city uses clams to supplement water quality sensors because they can detect even very low concentrations of contaminants. They glue a magnet to them so they can detect when they close. If enough clams close the system notifies staff.
I don't think they add any metals, but in one of the water treatment facilities in my city they stopped adding chlorine and reduced the dosage of dichlorine monoxide after it was upgraded to include ozone treatment and activated charcoal filtration.
That's fucking amazing. Those clams are public servants.
I just realized that I thought a 1 hour 15 minute podcast was like an abridged version (Pun intended) since I've gotten so used to pushing 3 hours.
Also from that angle Bezos space ship looks like one of those capsule corp spaceships from Dragonball Z
I miss those episodes 😢
_Probably just the preview for the patreon episode._
@@jakx2ob How are those patreon episodes?
@@jakx2ob I get episodes with my patreon? I thought I was just supporting the formation of a communist state
I hope bezos experiences the full ksp range of accomplishments, from rapid unplanned disassembly to lithobraking maneuver.
accelerated bridge construction is absolutely awesome when its replacing bridges over the interstate on sunday morning between 1:15 and 5:45am using four cranes and all the parts but the wet-deck are ready for bolting and welding off to the side...
While you’re on Melbourne bridges and cable-stays, honourable mention to the nearby Westgate bridge, which dropped a segment of road deck during construction on to the canteen below. Grim.
As he told it, my grandfather was the person who broke the news to the architect. He went down to the pub shortly after hearing it on the radio and asked the guy next to him whether he'd heard that the Westgate had collapsed, and the dude apparently went white as a sheet and nearly fainted.
When the 50th anniversary came around last year, I was thinking it would make a good WTYP episode.
It killed many of the workers taking their lunch break at the time, which reinforces the message of the Quebec Bridge episode - that you should never let your workers take a break.
That bridge is just too tall. Gives me the wiggins.
when you said "speaking of tacky rgb" I was terrified you were gonna say the sunshine skyway bridge, which (i think) is a cable stayed bridge that I grew up about a half a mile away from. they recently put some gamer lights on it
Just a reminder that pedestrian bridges are car infrastructure, not pedestrian infrastructure.
Why is this only 74 minutes? I expect full 180+ minutes of YayLiam for the money I don't pay!
Fun fact: on one of their road trips, WTYP crew once replaced a well's chlorine tank with a glitter tank and pumped it into a town's water supply which turned everyone fabulous for months.
I want this to be true so so so badly. Get on it, people!
No! That's microplastics! Beautiful beautiful microplastics!
@@AlRoderick Not if you get the glitter made from seaweed! :)
WTYT covering my home state...
My body's ready, Liam. Take me, you angry drunk! I'm yours!
You typically use ozone instead of chlorine. The disadvantage with ozone is that water can get contaminated in the pipes after treatment and there are no trace amounts of ozone to kill pathogens. There are typically trace amounts of chlorine.
I attended FIU 2016-2019 so I was there for it all.. it was a crazy time.. and I worked for the engineering department specifically the Civil engineering department on the accelerated bridge contsruction program in 2019 during the legal case....that was interesting.. Yea them talking about how hard it would be being drunk at 3am to cross those lanes is why they wanted the bridge. So many kids have died crossing the road bc people can't drive down here.
Around 8:00, hearing Liam's voice pan left and right while he reads is charming
Your safety third segment reminded me of a story. I was working in a health lab. I guy from the municipal water shop brought me a water sample. "Could you test this for chlorine?", he asks. "Sure, just leave it on the counter." Later, I test the sample with my magic chemicals. Nothing - contains no chlorine. I think about this a little bit and decide to dilute it 100 to 1. The sample turns blood red. I dilute it a 10000 to one and finally obtain a reportable result. I call the water shop, "What's with that water sample you left me?" "Ahh, we had a little problem."
If you're using the lower flange of the I-beam as the walkway, you're going to introduce a twisting moment due to the load; when class ends and a few tens of students are walking all at once you're going to have a force that an I-beam is specifically _not_ good at.
There is one reinforced concrete truss bridge in the United States - the McMillin Bridge in Pierce County, Washington. It was built in 1934 and is no longer used for vehicular traffic.
On the subject of “design/build,” MCM was the design/build contractor, but they hired Figg Engineering to do the design.
On the subject of urban design, the highway (US 41) was there first. When FIU was founded, in the 1960s, Sweetwater was still a small town and the traffic on the highway was undoubtedly much less. Student housing was placed across the highway only recently.
I tuned out when I learned that a concrete truss bridge at no point involves encasing Liz Truss within the concrete foundations of a bridge.
Jimmy Hoffa was already hogging the room inside the bridge foundations, sorry
She is still un-concreted, and has now been promoted. But at least the TERFs got owned in court
"Charmed by Oral Roberts"- as a native Tulsan, a phrase I have never heard, nor conceived of as possible to speak
The way the title cut off suggested a much funnier subject: "Well There's Your Problem | Episode 71: Florida..."
Florida: the only state that is, in and of itself, an engineering disaster.
orange groves, sinkholes, disappearing beaches, Nazi retirement colonies, failed invasions of Cuba, why not?
There is a pedestrian bridge in the middle of the campus of TU Dresden. It links the Audimax (German Latin from "auditorium maximum", basically the building containing the biggest lecture hall on campus) to the deceptively named "Neue Mensa" ("new dining hall") which is actually a couple decades old and was used as temporary refugee housing as it was deemed no longer fit for service as a dining hall. However, this bridge does not cross eleventy billion lanes of traffic but either one or two per direction. If you want to look it up on google, search for the bus stop "Technische Universität" of line 66.
"only had today to skim this"
That's basically what it's like when you have seminars in grad school.
I was literally eating nachos when I started listening, I feel extremely validated right now.
damn i was a student here when this happened and somehow when i started watching this pod I knew this episode was coming, half with dread and half with anticipation
I love the bridge episodes because I feel like it helps me apply stuff I'm learning in basic engineering classes.
there is a pedestrian tunnel in yellowknife, it is literally a concrete culvert with light under a four lane divided road
The school mascot for the Metropolitan State University of Denver is the "Road Runner". Not named after the bird but because as an urban college in its early days, the facilities were originally scattered among different downtown buildings and the students were often running in traffic to get to and from classes. The city eventually demolished an adjacent low-income neighborhood and built a dedicated campus - Yay Urban Renewal!
I can't imagine anything that would fit in better with the Schuylkill River's classical masonry and industrial bridge aesthetic than a pair of extremely modernist starchitect flair obelisks
Oh God I'm gonna be the comment guy. #1 I'm always happy to hear my dear hometown of New Orleans mentioned. We're a good lesson in having engineering problems and surviving in spite of them. One clarification: the Sewerage and Water Board pumps are more than a century old. They go offline at times because they are old and need new parts; all twenty-something of them and the power plant that feeds them are incredibly machine-specific. When it works it it a marvel of engineering. When it fails it can be a disaster-- forget hurricanes, a high tide on the Mississippi and lake coupled with heavy rainfall will test them to the limit, and thus the city can flood. New Orleans survived Katrina's direct hit (see the Mississippi Gulf Coast for eyewall damage). Katrina breached the the levee. Well, multiple levees. I live nearby the regional Army Corps of Engineers HQ so I try to tell myself it's safe here, but then again they are the folks in charge of that fiasco. It's worthy of an episode for sure.
Also Hand Grenades are disgusting. Get a Sazerac (America's first cocktail) instead. Love y'all.
Traditional water treatment uses chlorine, bromine or iodine. Beyond the low cost, the relative cleanliness of the water can easily be determined by the presence of chemical residuals. Other solutions such as UV and Ozone require the water be tested for the presence of individual or groups of pathogens to ensure effectiveness.
The benefit of chlorine treatment is the residual so that the water in the pipes still remain drinkable for longer and prevents biologicals from forming in the pipes
You joke, but Sacramento, CA literally raised the city by a story to deal with flooding. They just built the roads up another floor and abandoned the lower floor. There is currently a tour where you can tour the old streetfronts under the streets.
That's true in part of Seattle. Very cool tour.
In reference to safer alternatives to chlorine gas: most water utilities use chlorine for disinfection. The difference is which form you use. Gaseous chlorine is the cheapest, oldest, and most effective form, but also the most dangerous to handle.
The most common form used today is liquid chlorine (sodium hypochlorite). It’s safer, but also less potent (typically 12% to 18% concentration, compared to nearly 100% for the gas) and more expensive to buy and transport.
A third option is solid chlorine (calcium hypochlorite), which is sold as pucks. To use it, you put the pucks in a machine that sprays them with water until enough dissolves into a mixing tank to get the correct concentration, and the solution is then injected into the drinking water. This is good because you don’t have to haul a big, sloshing tank of liquid or dangerous gas cylinder, but the trade-off is that you have to operate and maintain the tablet-dissolving machine.
To add to that, UV can also be used for disinfection, but that's more for very small systems (e.g. a church) where the pipes aren't going back underground after the UV light. A large community water system /might/ have a UV light in addition to chlorine, but they won't exclusively rely on UV for disinfection
Just so's you knows, the Bolte Bridge is pronounced "Boltee". Also, the next bridge along on the same river, the West Gate Bridge, would make an excellent episode in itself - it collapsed during construction, killing 35 workers, and exposing the serious gaps in safety and labour laws of the time.
Aw dammit you called it already :D
Part of the bit that fell down is outside the entrance to the Engineering Department at Monash Uni, the Engineering School that the lead Engineer didn't graduate from that was Melbourne Uni.
We absolutely need an episode on the West Gate. Even after its construction it's been surrounded by death. Being a kid in Melbourne in the 00s, I remember the strong association of that bridge with suicide, and being absolutely shaken by the murder of Darcey Freeman.
Bölté Brōdgë or bust!
11:50 I would release a high voltage arc periodically from the tips of those towers to remind the moon who the boss is.
An alternative to Chlorine in water disinfection is Sodium Hypochlorite, commonly known as bleach. Your typical household bleach is about 6.5% concentrate. Sodium Hypochlorite (often referred to as Hypo in the biz) is around 12.5%-15% in concentration. The nice thing about Hypo is that at ambient temperature it is a liquid, thus solving (2) issues that Chlorine can propose. Those being: 1) Chlorine is a gas at ambient temperature and can thus easily enter operators lungs causing permanent damage and 2) being a liquid it easily visible given a leak. Additionally, since most people are aware of bleach they are aware of what bleach smells like thus making it all the much easier to detect a leak. The only thing that sucks about working with Hypo is that it bleaches your clothes when working around it making it look like you don't know how to do laundry. Also hypo can eat through your clothes. Reference: I worked for a GC and we upgraded a Chlorine gas disinfection system to a Sodium Hypochlorite System. Pretty cool project actually.
Phoenix is absolutely filled with this type of stroad in combination with an afterthought of a bike & ped infrastructure. When I saw the pictures I thought it easily could be anywhere in suburban Phoenix metro. It really is the Florida of the desert out here.
So...the signing engineer lost his license and is doing jail time for getting 7 people killed right? Right?
It's Florida what Ya think?
They're replacing this failed bridge with a standard cable stayed design if anyone was curious. They're also doing full road closures for all work over the roadway.
I've been watching your podcast for awhile now. A "Shake Hands With Danger" safety video came up in my recommended videos. It was some of the most anxiety laden 23 minutes of my life.
Definitely need to look up this video now. Thanks for the 'recommendation'! 😁🍍
"Don't record your own podcast while eating nachos."
Well There's Your Problem | Episode 193: Eating nachos while recording a podcast
As a former sunshine state resident, tamiami is pronounced like first part of tampa and second part of Miami. So like rhymes with Tammy. Second, very few residential houses have basements because running a pump 24/7/365 would be stupid even for Florida Man.
12:13 This, so much. I swear to God I just want a beige box PC with modern specs, no lights, no gimmicks. I built my PC deliberately with as few lights as possible but they still crept in and it is very annoying.
Anyways, happy pride month! |🏳️🌈
One dim green LED next to the power button, and *maybe* an orange one next to the "turbo" button. This is the pinnacle of PC case design.
@@chrysincognitio3751 pressing the turbo button ejects a cold beer from the integrated cooler
I know that feeling. I just wanted a back-lit mechanical keyboard, but it's either RGB or pay throuch your nose D:
@@SportyMabamba
Logitech g 610 Orion. Has cherry mx browns and white backlight
Listening to this July 2nd... Did Alice basically just foresee the Champlain tower collapse 😬😬😬
There is a bike tunnel under the Elbe in Hamburg.
When they put all the shipyards on the south bank in the 19th century, getting all the workers commuting in and out of work with ferries every day became a huge river traffic problem. Building a bridge that doesn't block cargo ships would have been too expensive, so they made a tunnel. You actually can take cars through it, but it's almost entirely used by pedestrians and bikes. It still has the original 1911 look, which is very cool.
Interesting enough, cable-stayed bridges date to as far back as 1595.
Woo! A disaster that I actually heard happen live. I worked about a half mile east of it, and was on my lunch break. From the distance it was just a loud thud.
I can't remember. I think I may have suggested this one in a comment way back, but yeah, there was a lot of incompetence that led to this happening.
Another terribly planned fuck up down here, was when they added express lanes to the interstate, but put terribly confusing signs leading in to them, so people would panic and swerve to get in/get out right before they started. I have no idea how many fatalities this caused, but there were a ton of high speed accidents. Checking online, an article says the split at one spot on I-95 is still the deadliest stretch of road in Florida.
I drafted some of the P/T install drawings for this job, funny enough. I also know personally some of the people named in the report on this one.
As a Florida man I can say this event was grimly unsurprising
Howdy! Second generation UCF grad here (my dad was in one of the first graduating classes after the name change). You could definitely do a WTYP on the never-ending growth of UCF's campuses.
Any chance you guys could cover the Marchioness disaster? Happened in London, August 1989. Two boats collided on the Thames, one a pleasure boat sank within 30 seconds, the other which had a drunk/hungover captain just carried on sailing. There was a massive coverup and hostility from the thatcher government towards the victims and their families.
Oh good one. Especially all the death students that drowned faster then anyone could imagine
"Tammy Yammy." The first roadway from Tampa to Miami.
Around 1920 there was this French guy who went to the Everglades, looked around, and decided, "Now this here is prime development land!!!" He took over a failed earlier cross-Florida road project to build a road from Naples, Florida to Miami, Florida. Between these two towns is seventy-five miles, non-stop, of the most unspeakable swamp. I once waded a total of a quarter-mile through it to set a property corner, the mosquitoes nearly bled me white. The construction crew built a raised roadbed across seventy-five miles of it, using 1920s construction equipment and lots and lots of dynamite.
Quite a bit more than seventy-five miles, in fact. A little while later the French guy also went bankrupt and construction, about halfway to Miami, halted. Then along came a Yankee advertising man named Collier, who bought a bunch of real estate near Naples. He bankrolled the completion, on the condition that the State of Florida should create a new county and name it after him! So they did that, but then he decided that he wanted the whole road to be in Collier County, so they abandoned a 25-mile-long section of already-built roadway in neighboring Monroe County and built a new twenty-mile section to the North.
Just for reference, for anyone who sees this, the alternatives to chlorine in water treatment would be UV sterilisation or Ozone injection. The reason these are more expensive is that they both require a lot of electricity on-site, whereas chlorine is a mass-produced industrial chemical and you don't need much of it to sterilise water. There may also be other options, but I'm no expert on this
I used to cross in the middle of the street to go to college too and there was an island with lots of trees in the middle, plus the street curved there, but I always took it upon myself to avoid cars because I've always assumed that other people in cars are a) idiots and b) actually trying to hit me. I would use the crosswalk if I was particularly drunk though, but I always found that to be more dangerous because there was at least a small expectation that cars would stop as they were supposed to but I'd rather trust my own two eyes than driving conventions to keep me safe while walking.
The biggest danger at my college was the high winds that were all too often a feature and I had to walk through this area to get back to my apartment where the buildings where stupidly built so that they created a narrowing area exactly in the direction from whence the winds would always come. Even though the buildings never got terribly close together, the increase in wind speed because they were creating this funnel between them was noticeable.
One evening, I had been in the pub studying for a midterm in molecular biology I had the next day. I was studying in the pub instead of at my apartment because I found that as soon as other students realized that I did rather well on the tests, they'd want to study with me. I prefer to study alone but I discovered that everyone would buy me beer if I studied with them so that's what I did before every test. The winds were calm when we started studying and, since I had nothing better to do, I helped anyone who showed up at the pub and they all bought me beers and I was there drinking for quite a few hours whilst helping people study. When my fellow classmates were finally all gone, I finished my beer and realized that the wind had picked up in that time and was now blowing at least 50-60 mph, which is what tends to happen in that area.
When I got outside into the wind, I realized how utterly soused I was from all the beers people had bought me and that my large backpack was acting like a sail, trying to push me forward. At least it was blowing in the direction I needed to walk to get to my apartment but I was really drunk and the wind was blowing me faster than I could walk... so I decided to start running! This turned out to be extra awesome because the wind was blowing me something like ten feet for every step because I was running and therefore not just shifting my weight from one foot to the other while trying to keep one foot on the ground at all times. I did use the crosswalk that time because just the fact that it was so fun to be blown along the path whilst running in the wind made me think that I might be too drunk to cross in the middle of the road, plus the wind had a tendency to blow big branches down from the trees and there were a lot of trees in the median island where I would stop before crossing the second half of the road. That went fine because it was getting late and so there were no cars for me to trust to stop for the light while I crossed on the crosswalk. I thought for sure that I would probably fall down running in the wind on the uneven sidewalk on the other side of the street but that went fine too. I had a sickening hangover the next day so I struggled not to erase my pencil writing from my sweaty hungover hands during the test the next day, but I did get a B+ on the test (although I would normally get an A had I not been so hungover).
Bezos is basically taking a rapid balloon ride, it's not like he's going into orbit.
I spent 10+ years at FIU as a student and then-employee in their facilities department. The state process of forcing to accept the lowest bid contracts have resulted in cheaper and cheaper buildings. FIU's president, Mark Rosenberg, has been obsessed for a decade now with rapidly expanding the university despite the lack of public transit and walkable spaces. The university expanded (and swallowed up) the neighboring municipality Sweetwater, to which the bridge was connecting to.
The locksmiths at FIU would always complain about how these contractors would do such shitty and cheap work. They'd always mess up installing door frames, so the facilities dept at the uni couldn't even install the doors properly without needing the contractors to return and fix their mess. I recall this happening in one of the recently built medical buildings on campus next to the site of the bridge. It always seemed like a matter of time before here would be an incident.
We’re so close to sea level that no one in Miami even has a basement!
"the only thing he could think to spend his money on was space, wich is great, cool guy stuff"
what about paying livable wages instead
But that would be communism
that's boring, not cool guy stuff
And it all loops back. I started to listening to engineering youtube channels because of this collapse. That led me to Roz's donoteat, and the start of all this.
Yay Liam! Boo capitalism!
I've watched like half a dozen videos from different channels about this bridge and Justin is the first one I've seen who actually pointed out that the visual reason the truss is angled the way it is, is to give the illusion it lines up with the faux stays on the roof
As a construction worker, no one is ever happy until you're gone.
That's because you can't hear them complain anymore.
@@robmoney That's true too and no you cannot walk though my job site you have to walk around
As a Melburnian, I must correct you on your pronunciation, it is pronounced the 'Bolt E Bridge'. Which is actually better for this. Rename it to be the Bolt E-bridge and make it a full gamer bridge. Was totally caught off guard by the Bolte being mentioned though. When I was a kid I did think the towers were totally aesthetic.
bolt-uh
@@atn_holdings I've lived in Victoria my whole life and I have never ever heard it pronounced like that. The bridge is named after Henry Bolte, whose surname is pronounced 'bolty'. There are many videos about him from the time he was alive and shortly after his death that pronounce his name this way. It definitely is not pronounced 'bolt-uh'.
"What if we bring the bridge back to the previous condition where it was fine?"
Oh yeah, let's treat the problem like loading a System Restore Point to fix Windows. Should patch that concrete just fine.