The bridge is at 52.114667, -102.139722 [1][2], on a road named 'Dyck Memorial Road' (unsigned) [3], west of the hamlet of Swan Plain which lies at the intersection of SK Highway 8 and the aforementioned road.
The previous bridge was closed to heavy traffic in late 2017 [4], and the complete replacement was planned over the summer of 2018 [5][6]. The project was tendered and awarded to Can-Struct of Regina, SK, for CAD 325,000 [7].
As a European it boggles my mind on how many long and straight roads there are around the bridge. Here in the Netherlands we can't keep a road straight for more than a few kilometers even on new land we created from the sea: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Flevoland/@52.382114,5.386...
Not that this completely answers your question, but this is in the middle of the Canadian prairies. It’s very sparsely populated (less than a million in the province of SK that’s about the size of California - with 2/3 in the capital city). It’s amazingly flat. I can remember seeing thunderstorms over a town that I just spent 2 hours driving away from at highway speeds (~200 km away). It’s mostly partitioned out into huge, square farm land tracts.
Basically there isn’t much stopping you from building roads that run straight for hundreds of kilometers.
Roads also tend to follow established routes because infrastructure tends to pop up along well traveled places. Europe is full of wacky routes because some farmers in the 1100s had go go around the land of the lord that was feuding with their lord in order to trade with the people in a village on the land of a lord who was on good terms with their lord. Then someone built an inn along the route, then another village popped up, etc, etc Except for the eastern edge, North America has neither of those sources of "legacy road" that constrain the design of new roads. You can just build straight lines from A to B to C.
This MAY be intentional. One of the ideas behind "urbanism" is that in order to reduce vehicle speeds, design speed of a road must be low and the main technical measures are speed bumps, road width and curvature - if you make a road narrow and curvy, it is technically difficult to speed there.
You get curves like that on the german Autobahn too. The problem is that in Europe, you don't get very far without running into either a hill, a swamp or a town, in which case your options are limited.
A hill can only be so steep until the trucks can't go over anymore without dropping to unsafe speeds (60kph are the legal minimum when driving on the Autobahn, trucks need to be able to go faster and do so safely).
A swap can be expensive to go over so you might do a slight curve and only go over a small part of it to save money.
A town might not allow the autobahn to go through or might only allow it on the outer edges.
That's in addition to the fact that lots of roads in Europe are historical, ie, grown from the paths that people have always used between cities, so they don't take a straight, optimal path to begin with.
Another eeason for this is to keep drivers alert. Even small "course corrections" raise awareness of a driver which is the driving force behind non-straight routes in Europe, besides geography of course.
The only rwaly straight sections on the German Autobahn are relicts from the Cold War. The plan was to use them, no joke, together with any parking lots next to them as back-up military airfields. But they are getting rare nowadays.
Thanks for the google maps link - one of my stars is <14 KM away. I met a lot of Canadians while driving in my cab. A good number have second homes here.
My Canadian friend just said she'd taken her horse across the old bridge, which was replaced because water flowed over it during the spring melt. Saskatchewan has a lot of agriculture - they grew wheat, canola, barley, oats, peas, flax, etc.
Met this one post-taxi driving. She'd bought a trailer and parked it in Yarnell, just before the hill fire [1][2], and found her way to the rural part of Arizona that I'm currently living in. She has interesting stories and anecdotes.
Can-Struct looks to be a general contractor. No Engineers or techs listed with them on linked-in. Their website is down right now. best description of the company here:
Engineering was done by Inertia Solutions [1][2][3] from Regina, which CBC reports [4] as having the same owner as Can-Struct. Also, archive.org has partial backups [5] of can-struct.ca but are incomplete.
From browsing around a bit, it looks like they've designed/built a number of similar bridges, although their others look like shorter spans at an amateur glance. Not that that necessarily means anything.
Only today, my parallel-boss was explaining to me that only Canadian Codes have started allowing monolithic bridge instead of traditional simply supported configuration.
And evening, I get this news. Though only top slabs seems like monolithic construction, and main bridge girder is still piece-wise simply supported. It's enlightening to hear from the seniors.
Moreover, absence of R/f in top slab seems to be a demo case of new age "Just do it with our admixture (chemicals)" pitching we get from some of the manufactures.
EDIT: Looking from the picture: My first guess is support settlement of one of the intermediate columns. One more thing, I found strange was that we generally tend to avoid Steel Columns going below the top level of the water in the stream, generally we keep Concrete coming few metre above the water level and than steel starting, but the far off columns stills seems to be going into the water. Even though, it's not that rare, all offshore steel platform have still going into water but they are designed with far stringent specifications and definitely not for such small scale bridges.
"The bridge was built to Canadian Bridge Standards and unfortunately something under the riverbed failed, that could not have been anticipated.
This caused the pier to sink and the middle span to fall off the pier cap and into the river. "
It might have been, say, three years under construction, with a contract dispute interrupting construction for 2.8 of those years, the bridge sitting half-constructed and getting rain-weathered the entire time, and then just finally this month, construction resumed, was completed, and the bridge opened.
You know, like most Canadian buildings.
(Here in Vancouver, I see plenty of stick-built buildings left half-constructed due to developer or zoning problems, with their frames and plywood panelling just left exposed to the elements for months; and then construction resumes and the building has sheeting and cladding and insulation slapped on over just a few days. I've always wondered whether that traps in the moisture that's accumulated in the wood over the previous months, leading to those buildings having mould problems later on...)
Not sure where you got that idea from, but as a structural engineer in Vancouver I generally see the exact opposite. Once construction starts, it's an all out scramble to finish as quickly as possible.
Also, zoning problems occur at the building permit stage, which is well before construction starts.
I only know what I see walking around the neighbourhoods I frequent: buildings (usually single-family dwellings, but sometimes low-rises) that have sat half-completed, with no active construction, for months or even years.
I’ve always assumed it was a result of either the development company or their general contractor going out of business / running out of budget before completion; and that, when construction resumes, it’s because the site has been liquidated and sold at auction to a new developer.
Other times, buildings (usually commercial) are left 90% finished for years at a time—clad and insulated, but not wired or finished inside. I assume this these buildings are actually as finished as they’re going to get, and are for sale, waiting for an initial owner to decide how they want to finish them (instead of having to rip out and redo the previous interior and exterior), and they just aren’t being publically advertised. They still look kind of like blighted abandoned buildings, though, and kind of destroy the character of a neighbourhood in a similar way to the half-built homes.
You can both be right! Most buildings could be finished quickly, but at any given point time there will be more delayed buildings than ones being quickly constructed. This is for the same reason that most people who go to prison in the US do so for a sentence less than six months, and yet the prison population at any point is mostly people with > 10 year sentences.
If you want a "fun" story about an unfinished commercial building, just google "I-4 eyesore".
Down in Orlando (actually Altamonte, but if you're not from Central Fla, it's Orlando), there's a building a local mega-church has been "constructing" since 2001. They wanted to build it with no financing, and kept putting construction on hold every time they ran out of funds. Pretty sure at this point they've spent more in property taxes for a building they can't use than they would have spent in interest if they'd just financed it from the start, but, shrug.
It's a pretty ugly building design to begin with, too. All those mirrored windows are blinding when the sun hits them the right way.
That's one freaky building but organizers probably figured ...the Lord will provide which can be countered with Aesop's Hercules and the Wagoneer moral the gods help those who first provide the gods something to work with (ie labor and resources not just wishes). On observation, how lax have the lower-medium-income housing building codes become in the Orlando area? I live in a sprawling one-story house built like a concrete bunker in SW FL which survived the 140mph winds of hurricane Charlie and others (also helps it's 21 feet above sea level so somewhat immune to surges), with damage only to a pool cage. But in hurricane aftermaths you saw flimsy garden apartment frame-construction type structures demolished by broken trees and flying debris. Yet today you still see relatively dense pack housing being constructed the same way. Seems sad, knowing their inevitable fate.
They swear it will be finished this year, which they've said before, but there is actually construction currently ongoing at the site, which is a good sign, I suppose. I live north of Orlando, so I have to drive by it anytime I head that way.
As for building codes, I'm not sure. I just moved back down to central Fl after living in Gainesville the past 20 years. I do know that 30 years of living in Florida has taught me to never buy a mobile home. Hurricanes flatten those. I feel bad for the folks that don't have the ability to afford something more sturdy.
There's a lot of new construction in the next neighborhood over from mine (old golf course turned housing development), but I'm not sure if they're stick-frame houses or concrete. It's also an upscale development, not lower-middle-class.
Fair enough, single family homes are a different story because holding costs are so low, and the owner is usually financing the construction. Larger projects have significant construction mobilization (just the crane is costing hundreds of thousands) and the developer has already presold many or all of the units. I would estimate bankruptcy happens on less than 1% of our projects (we design about 30% of the residential towers you see being constructed in the lower mainland). That number probably shoots up for smaller projects.
Commercial units are left that way even for leasing, because the tenant will come and finish it to their specifications (once a tenant is found).
For these large projects, I've noticed something else that I've been curious about: condo projects that sit as empty lots with "coming soon" banners around them, for years at a time before they begin construction.
What's up with that? My first guess: by the time the developer gets zoning approval, the contractor they've retained has taken other work, and now they're waiting in line.
Yeah, a lot of the delay is coming from the rezoning and permitting process. There are crazy wait times for large projects because of the large queue of applications, understaffed planning departments, public consultations, and semi-extortionary negotiation over community amenity contributions (CACs). Often the trades aren't brought on board that early because the delay and uncertainty of whether the project will go forward. Once a permit is received, then it's usually full steam ahead and we are often asked to product tender and construction drawings in impossible timelines.
I remember seeing nearly finished building in Croatia, lacking only the exterior finish, but (apparently) with people living Inside. I first though it was a cost-cutting measure, saving on seemingly unecessary work, but I've also heard it was to avoid taxes on buildings.
When I first moved to Romania I saw the same and always wondered why. Now I built a small home and left it like this so I don't pay taxes (wanted to build, leave there a year of two and sell).
You also don't pay as much taxes when sold not finished.
Haiti had/has the same rule: property taxes only applied to finished structures, so many of the rural dwellings were left unfinished.
When my wife volunteered there right before the earthquake she said that many structures had exposed rebar sticking out of the concrete. She thinks that increases the fatalities significantly.
That was my exact memory of Croatia - I remember so many nearly finished buildings with "rebar" sticking out of the top of walls or unfinished exteriors - and they looked like they'd been that way for a while.
Personnaly I did not see that many of them and they were all inland, not on the coast, where the housing market might be different.
Also the remnants of the war had a much bigger impact on my memories of the country: we saw a few buildings still covered with bullet holes and areas cut off because of mines. That nearly two decades after the war such things were still visible was an interesting experience.
There's a building in development just down the road from me. It's been in a half finished state for almost two years. It spent the year before that as a hole in the ground. The lot next to it has finished one highrise and nearly completed another and a group of town houses in the same time period. The unfinished site also has a far smaller crew there regularly and will go weeks at a time with no activity.
I figure the other developers keep running out of money. To be fair, developers of the completed building, Leddingham-McAllister paid people to come from China to buy units. I spoke to a few of them one day when I seen them lined up down the road.
The company paid for their airfare and hotels so they could come purchase suites in their apartment complex. This was before construction actually started. I never seen any lineups of paid foreign buyers at the other one.
On another note, all the developments that have been completed in the almost ten years i've lived where I do, have remained at least half empty. Most of the suites have never had lights on orbeven curtains put up since they've been built. No ones ever lived in a good majority of the empty suites around me.
And at least one group of them are used for prostitution. I regularly see ads posted nearby offering girls $2000 a week and such to live and work in the buildings.
> The Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities inspected the bridge earlier this year and told the RM that it would need to be replaced as it was rotting and dangerous.
> The municipality put out a tender and selected Can-Struct, who had been working on the project for the last four or five weeks.
They could very well end up with expanding plywood or osb syndrome, which makes the building much less structurally sound and might require expensive repairs down the line. Mould would be the least of your problems!
The two remaining road sections aren't level with each other. I'm not a bridge engineer, but it looks like the supporting columns on the near-side may have sunk and snapped the centre-span at that point, which then sheared-off at the other side due to lack to support.
If that photo is anything to go by it looks like the concrete beams forming the centre span were not supported by the horizontal I-beams, causing the span to fall into the river below. I'll have to assume the centre span originally did rest on those I-beams so it would seem that they have moved, either during construction or due to some external influence.
Look how cleanly the center span has split into six. It must have been made of six precast concrete beams [1] which would have been lifted into place by crane. You don't see any exposed rebar because the deck beams themselves haven't broken.
Shame they fell off when the blue metal pier sank.
It looks like the center span was not supported by the vertical bridge supports. It makes one wonder what the engineers were thinking - even the construction people should have questioned it.
On the far pier, the diagonal braces are a meter above the water, while on the near pier they're 20cm below the water.
My bet is when it was constructed the two piers were at the same height, and the center span was supported on both ends - then the near pier sank, allowing the center span to slip off.
They keep saying "built to Canadian standards" in this article. I'm sure they mean that as "built to 1st world, legally relevant standards", but given the context it sounded like they were saying "Canadian standards" as an excuse for why it fell down.
However, the previous bridge, presumably also built to Canadian standards, held up for half a century and was still working (albeit apparently not looking great) when they ordered it replaced.
> "Canadian standards" as an excuse for why it fell down.
It's a bit like here in US some construction companies will advertise they "build to code". That sounds scary to me, as all I hear is they would really like to cut corners, but it's those pesky building codes getting in the way.
Nobody wants less than code, because it won't pass inspection. Nobody wants more than code, because it would cost more money. So it gets built to code minus whatever the local inspectors can be expected to let slide.
Right, but it's the fact that it gets advertised as a great feature that seems odd. It's one of those cases where the same statement can be interpreted in opposite ways.
It's not so much that they want to build crap (margins are better on "nice" things anyway) but that if you have to do something you may as well list it as a feature. It's like how all the electronic nannys on modern cars are advertised as features even though they're required.
Construction companies and contractors make money building things. An estimate, quote or contract for whatever work is being done typically includes a profit margin on materials, labor and anything sub'd out. If anything they want code that specifies everything be grossly overbuilt.
Not really. Nice construction is generally not valued highly. Builders construct to code because higher R-values, better house wrap, pressure treated cladding, etc. don’t really raise the sale price of the house. If you’re talking about multimillion dollar custom homes, sure, this stuff starts to matter, mostly because the people buying multimillion dollar custom homes will sue you for only building to code because they expect better.
All true but I think the more central issue is, whether or not the person who will live in the house (or drive over the bridge) is present during construction, and knowledgeable enough to notice whether things are being done well. In general, the answer to one or the other is "no". The only exceptions are, as you say, in multimillion dollar custom homes, and then only sometimes.
I am to understand that in all of her Majesties kingdoms they have regulations against making things of cardboard such that the front does not fall off.
There might well be problems with the supports, but I'm surprised that there are no beams in this design. Steel beams would be the most practical for this size, but I don't see any pre-stressed concrete beams either. Concrete deck is poured in place with non-stressed reinforcement, so it isn't very resistant to bending, and is rarely expected to span such a distance by itself. I know of a shorter one-lane bridge that never has more than one tractor or big truck on it at one time, that nevertheless has a 6" steel beam under the concrete deck under each tire track. Perhaps it was over-engineered, but then again perhaps the bridge in TFA was under-engineered...
It looks to me like they are using timbers as beams, simply supported on the steel piers. It's a very common bridge design for forest service roads and other rural routes.
Can you point out where you see timber beams in the photo? I can't even find a place where they would go; to me the deck looks like pour-in-place unreinforced concrete that sheared right off at the piers; the deck is then covered in what looks like gravel (which also seems a bit bizarre), then a wooden guardrail on wooden posts is bolted into the concrete deck.
The bridge looks to be precast concrete box-girders (hollow rectangular beams with plenty of steel reinforcement around the edges). The 'gravel' is the asphalt roadway (often this will be cast-in-place concrete) that's poured on top of the precast girders. The purpose of pouring the asphalt/concrete roadway on top is as a sacrificial wear element to prevent the structural beams being worn down by traffic.
Almost looks like the foundations/pilings sunk on the one side, causing the concrete to fracture at the support points since it was being "bent" and then the slabs to fall off of the support once it had sunk enough. Kinda like this brick domino video [0], but with much larger slabs.
Lol who told you that. Engineering in Canada is essentially cultism.
Also here where I live (Edmonton) — the contractors had to rebuild the bridge because even before they finished building it, it became bent.
During the latest election season a funny line came up during the debates:
“Our friends to the south are sending rockets into space, and we’re still trying to figure out how to build bridges”
As I typed that I also just remember a piece of news about our new LRT line. The new “high tech” signaling system is essentially broken, forcing the train operators to run in “visual identification mode” —- meaning half the speed so they can stop if they see something on the tracks. There is a lawsuit, and the company has until December to fix it. The line has been open for about 2 years now.
In MN, since the I-35W went down, I’d go so far as to categorize the bridges that have gone up as appearing “overbuilt”. Which is probably a good thing. It at least appears to me like they’re taking bridge safety seriously. Inspection of existing bridges kicked up strongly, and Dailing bridge inspections make the news.
Narrows was almost a century ago, and taught bridge builders to consider airflow. The more recent I-5 bridge collapse was because a truck was too tall and collided with bridge supports.
I'm not a bridge engineer, but I'm pretty sure that height requirements are there for a reason. In fact, I looked at this incident last week, and it seemed that there was a different maximum height depending on which lane you were in, but that was ignored/not acted on.
The vertical clearance from the roadway to the upper arched beam in the outer lane is 14 feet 7 inches (4.45 m), and all trucks with oversize loads are expected to travel in the inside lane where the clearance is around 17 feet (5.2 m). The oversize truck instead entered the bridge in the outer lane, while a second semi-truck and a BMW were passing it in the inner lane. ... A pilot car was hired to ensure the load could pass safely. The pilot car never signalled the truck driver that there would be a problem crossing the Skagit bridge and did not warn the trucker to use an inside lane.
He will probably invent several new words to describe the clusterfark that resulted from (most likely) substandard materials or practices being used. Whether intentionally or not it seems like a logical explanation.
Where do you think Keanu comes from? ;-) (badumtss)
Jokes aside, I graduated from Concordia University in Montreal and feel quite ironic that the Troitsky Bridge Building Competition is a thing while we seem to suck at building real bridges.
Montreal has its fair share of bad bridges. IIRC, the Champlain Bridge was touted as not requiring salt for de-icing in winter; it was never designed to protect against salt, yet it was salted every winter. The concrete is so damaged that a new bridge had to be built to replace it (which should complete this year, I haven't been back to Montreal in a long time so I don't know what it looks like now).
Needs no salting because there is always a ton of traffic on it and vehicles can barely go over 20 KM/h. That's one way to reduce accidents I guess ...
> > The county shire-reeve is quite helpful in policing the unincorporated areas.
> Indeed that's their primary function in California.
I think that depends on the county and the degree and population of unincorporated land; running the local detention and corrections system is arguably a more important role in much of California (certainly so in SF, where the City and County are coextensive so that there is no unincorporated land to police.)
Even if it wasn't collapsed that would still be a pretty lame looking bridge. Why would you put piles in the river for such a short span? Why is the design so ugly?
Strange that this story picked up while in Miami a new bridge at FIU collapsed even before inauguration and took some lives with it and HN didn't bother much.
I obviously know nothing about this sort of engineering, because to me this looks like a teeny weeny bridge, taking ~50 cars a day - it breaking is barely more newsworthy to me than dropping my coffee. Is this a sort of "not just in Italy..." story?
The previous bridge was closed to heavy traffic in late 2017 [4], and the complete replacement was planned over the summer of 2018 [5][6]. The project was tendered and awarded to Can-Struct of Regina, SK, for CAD 325,000 [7].
[1] https://www.google.com/maps/place/52°06'52.8"N+102°08'23.0"W... [2] https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/256112153 [3] http://myrm.info/333/files/2017/11/RM333_2017_Fall.pdf [4] http://myrm.info/333/notices/swan-plain-bridge-dyck-memorial... [5] http://myrm.info/333/notices/swan-plain-bridge/ [6] http://myrm.info/333/notices/dyck-memorial-bridge/ [7] https://www.sasktenders.ca/content/public/print.aspx?competi...