State Patrol: I-5 bridge over Skagit River collapses in NW Wash; vehicles, people in water
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By Associated Press, Updated: Thursday, May 23, 7:52 PM
MOUNT VERNON, Wash. — The Washington State Patrol says the Interstate 5 bridge over the Skagit River at Mount Vernon has collapsed, dumping vehicles and people into the water.
Trooper Mark Francis said the four-lane bridge collapsed about 7 p.m.
Francis says he has no idea how many people are in the water or whether there are any injuries or deaths.
He did not know what caused the collapse.
I hope there are no deaths from this but this sounds terrible so far, 7:00 PM being rush hour...
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Rush hour in Mt. Vernon/Burlington? Pfffft. Entire micropolitan area has about twenty thousand people at most. I am very worried about the people in the water, but there would be only four or five cars on that short section of bridge; I've never encountered traffic much below the speed limit before, so it's not like a bunch of cars were sitting on it. There is fortunately (replacing another old, two-lane bridge), a new four-lane bridge in Mt. Vernon-Burlington over the Skagit River a few blocks east, but then there's only the two-lane bridge in downtown Mt. Vernon after the river turns south, the two-lane bridge at La Conner to Fidalgo Island, and the two-lane SR-9 bridge into Sedro Wooley many miles north. So it will be a great hardship for a lot of people living in the area as there are no good alternative routes. Should check and make sure everyone in my biological family is okay; we all live on either side of the bridge, more or less.
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Report is an oversized-load semi-truck ripped off a main girder, the bridge collapsing almost instantly after the semi cleared the bridge. The semi did stop on the next off-ramp and is being held as the suspect in the collapse with the driver being interrogated... The eye-witnesses report that the oversized load was following behind its guide vehicle too closely; when the warning whip on the guide vehicle struck the bridge it did not have enough time to stop.
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Sadly it still won't get the attention it needs until it causes serious deaths or something. Scary that I'll be using the bridge on the representative's radar this Saturday.
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Meest wrote:Sadly it still won't get the attention it needs until it causes serious deaths or something. Scary that I'll be using the bridge on the representative's radar this Saturday.
Given that half the bridge is in the water and the whole structure impassible I think it actually will get some attention, if only because they now need a new bridge what with half the old one missing in action.
Reports this morning is no deaths and the injured are recovering.
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Yeah I-5 is totally shut down in both directions. For the foreseeable future. On the plus side, less fucking British Colombians who cannot drive worth a shit!
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This is what happens when the GOP blocks any and all efforts to use stimulus on infrastructure. Apparently they operate under the belief that these structures last forever with little to no maintenance.
Wait, I'm missing something. How did we go from "negligent oversized truckload strikes girder of recently-inspected, structurally sound bridge in full regulatory compliance and causes collapse" to "this is what happens when the GOP blocks infrastructure spending"?
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Is the bridge to the right impassable? Because it's less than 3 min walking distance from the collapsed one, why would you need to close the road when small detour suffices?
It didn't collapse due to being obsolete, but it was far from being perfectly good.
The article about truck hitting the bridge cited above wrote:The bridge was not classified as structurally deficient, but a Federal Highway Administration database listed it as being "functionally obsolete" -- a category meaning that the design is outdated, such as having narrow shoulders and low clearance underneath.
The bridge was built in 1955 and has a sufficiency rating of 57.4 out of 100, according to federal records. That is well below the statewide average rating of 80, according to an Associated Press analysis of federal data, but 759 bridges in the state have a lower sufficiency score.
Of course, the blame for the collapse remains with the truck driver, who was being neglicent in this case, but it could be speculated if it would have collapsed, or just gotten badly damaged if it had a higher score...
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Is the bridge to the right impassable? Because it's less than 3 min walking distance from the collapsed one, why would you need to close the road when small detour suffices?
You have the close the road from one exit to another in order to form the detour. And he detour is going to be on municipal streets which will just slow everything down to a crawl. This is the main link between Seattle and Vancouver.
We pissing our pants yet?
-Negan
You got your shittin' pants on? Because you’re about to Shit. Your. Pants!
-Negan
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-George Bernard Shaw
The score includes clearances, my friends. That means a perfectly sound bridge will get a lower score if it doesn't have widen enough lanes, shoulders, proper modern guard rails, or the full recommended height clearance of a modern bridge on the kind of highway upon which it sits. Thus, Washington State, which has a policy of reconstructing bridges (remember that a C grade is HIGH for US infrastructure) rather than replacing them, has kept the bridge structurally sound, but cannot increase its clearance to modern standards.
The bridge just up-river is two lanes in each direction and actually brand new, so it will be fine. There's a bunch of other detours; I'd get off at the Stanwood exit to avoid the chaos and drive up the coast to LaConner and through the Skagit delta flats, and then get on Chuckanut drive north (SR-11) if I had to deal with this.
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The Inventory is used for federal funding purposes. A "bridge sufficiency rating" is calculated, based 55% on the structural evaluation, 30% on the obsolescence of its design, and 15% on its importance to the public. As of 2008, a score of 80 or less is required for federal repair funding, and 50 or less for federal replacement funding.
So a 57.5 could indicate that structurally it was near perfect, while the design was completely obsolate and it was pretty impressively unimportant. Given the bridge is like 3 blocks from another, newer, larger bridge, I'm leaning towards that score being pretty low, and the indicators about a lack of shoulder, clearance, lane width indicate the design was obsolescent as well. Implicitly, it was pretty structurally sound, before a truck started knocking girders off.
Looks to me like anyone who knows about the second bridge is going to be taking it, unless they'd be delayed more by the traffic slowing down in that area than the extra time needed to go the long way around.
From what I understand, that particular bridge has had a history of "high load" impacts. The latest was the straw that broke the camel's back.
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