Collapse of Overpass in California Becomes Lesson in Construction
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| Audience/Grade: | College Freshman-Continuing Education |
| Discipline(s): |
Design Engineering Ethics General Engineering, Engineering Science |
| Special Topic(s): | |
| Learning Resource Type: |
Reference - Article/Document |
| Author(s): |
Organization:the Online NewsHour, PBS |
| Description: | "An overpass near the Oakland-San Francisco Bay Bridge collapsed last month after a gasoline truck crashed into a guardrail and burst into flames. For an engineering professor, the incident has turned into a lesson for building safer structures. At 3:40 a.m., on the last Sunday in April, a gasoline truck crashed into the guard rail on a major California freeway near the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge and burst into flames. The fire was so intense, it caused an overpass to collapse. The damage closed two heavily traveled freeways and caused commuters to alter their routes. The collapse of the freeways was more than just a local traffic nightmare; it was an object lesson in freeway construction and destruction. And it had many similarities to the obliteration of the World Trade Center. Abolhassan Astaneh should know. He's a professor of civil engineering at the University of California at Berkeley and was one of the leading structural engineers who studied the collapse of the World Trade Center on 9/11." Transcript with links to read Audio and streaming video of the May 10, 2007 NewsHour with Jim Lehrer and Spencer MIchels on PBS. UC Berkeley Professor Abolhassan Astaneh was one of the experts interviewed. Quote: "In both of them, basically, the fire was the reason why steel got soft and weak and collapsed. In both of them, I feel that we, as engineers, if we had looked at them and learned the lessons, we could really apply these lessons to build safe structures." |
| Rating: |
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| Related Resources | |
| Keywords: | bridge collapse bridge failure bridge safety bridge monitoring civil infrastructure bridge design truss design |
| Referenced By: |
Recovery Efforts Continue After Minneapolis Bridge Collapse |
| Usage Tip | |
| Related ABET Criteria: |
(b) Design and conduct experiments, analyze and interpret data (c) Design a system, component, or process (h) Understand global, economic, environmental, and societal context |
| Use of Resource: |
Useful for a case study in ethics or civil/ structural engineering. Also useful to show engineers communicating to the public. Part of a series on engineering experts on the NewsHour. The site also has a "using NewsHour Extra Worksheets" section for high school and lower division introductory science and technology classes. |
| Difficulty: |
Easy |
| Interactivity Level: |
Medium |
| Version Info | |
| Publication Date: | March 2007 |
| Platform/Format: |
WWW |
| Cost: |
Free |
| Download URL: | http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/science/jan-june07/overpass_05-10. |
| Metadata: |
IEEE LOM Record |
| Collection: |
NEEDS
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