Bridge collapses in Atlanta

Rebuilding bridges often goes pretty quick. Most of the time and effort in building new bridges is figuring out the underlying geology, coming up with a plan for the foundations then building said foundations. When a bridge is already there all that is taken cared of.
 
Rebuilding bridges often goes pretty quick. Most of the time and effort in building new bridges is figuring out the underlying geology, coming up with a plan for the foundations then building said foundations. When a bridge is already there all that is taken cared of.


This is true, but it isn't quite that simple.

The kind of bridge makes a difference, as does its location.

This situation was helped by the fact that the bridge design was (I believe, from my recollection of the photos of the scene.) primarily precast members and slabs which could be re-fabricated from the drawings and possibly even the molds from the original build, and that it wasn't over water or extreme terrain.

Determining the full extent of the damage probably took up a fair amount of the rebuild time. Pre-stressed precast can be produced fairly quickly with high-early concrete. By the time they had done a full site survey and clean-up they probably had most of the replacement sections well into production.
 
Side note, the one of the main area of research at the University of Washington's structural engineering department is speeding up construction and repair of bridges. It largely involves using pre-cast concrete as much as possible. The hard part is making the connections ductile*. For what its worth, quad is right, pre-cast makes repair and replacement a lot easier. State DOTs have also pretty much standardized their overpasses to more or less be interchangeable. That helps, as quad notes, it means any precasters in the state will likely have the molds sitting around.

*Ductile means able to absorb a lot of energy prior to total failure so it fails slowly and folks have enough time to get way from the thing before it collapses.
 

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