China: Idiot Truck driver crushes weak bridge

[madd0ct0r]

Hey kids, see what happens when I try and drive a 160 tonne truck full of sand over a 55 tonne limit bridge!

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/truck-causes-b ... 07885.html

very pretty.

looks like he trundled on, go onto the first span which promptly collapsed, snapping in the middle. The section of bridge still in front of the truck was now having to produce the horizontal force to decelerate 160 tonnes of sand. Hence why the pier fell over. Terrifyingly, it looks like the sodding pier had no vertical rebar in it (normal horizontal loads on a single pier are tiny, outside of an earthquake).

I thought it was a classic progressive collapse in continuous spans at first, but it might not be. If it was the deck would be in one piece over the tops of the piers with spans alternating between bent up and bent down (hogging and sagging). On that little vid I can't see where the piers are.

On the picture (which might be wrong as it's clearly during demolition) it looks like the deck is snapped over the piers, indicating simply supported spans. In which case it could be each span buckled in response to the horizontal force from the crashing truck - the same force that snapped the first pier entirely. That could only happen if the other piers were better reinforced though. Or the bridge had multiple types of span. Or if I'm just plain wrong. wouldn't be the first time.

[Teebs]

Would a single (public road using) truck actually be able to haul 160 tons of sand? That sounds like quite a lot.

[LadyTevar]

You'd be surprised how much a truck can haul. If they're paid by the tonnage, drivers go over their truck's legal limit all the time in the US, so I'd not be surprised if this truck was overweight as well

[madd0ct0r]

i think it's actually 160 tonnes including the weight of the truck itself. I could have phrased it better but parsing " 160 tonnes including the weight of the truck itself" will always be an arse.

[Sea Skimmer]

I'm a bit skeptical that is a 160 tonne truck. The damn cab should barely be able to move that, though that oversize semi trailer likely can hold that much sand. In any case that would be about four times the normal limit in the US or Europe for unescorted vehicles and heavier then a main battle tank on a tank transporter.

[JointStrikeFighter]

Most mining haultrucks are only in the 150-200ton cargo load category, so yeah probably not 160 tons.

[Iroscato]

Well, whatever the weight was, it was clearly way too fucking much for the bridge
Wonder what the driver will get for it...

[LaCroix]

Well, given that it is China, and the fact that he has damaged something public that will affect a lot of people negatively, it will probably be harsh.

[Isolder74]

After reading the article and watching the vid with it and seeing the damage to the bridge I must say that the concrete does not look very well made and I'm suspicious. Not only do I find it hard to believe that the truck actually was carrying 160 tons, but by the looks of the bridge itself it looks as if the structure itself wasn't properly built.

Sounds to me like someone is trying to make a scapegoat out of the truck driver to draw attention away from the badly built bridge.

[Iroscato]

After reading the article and watching the vid with it and seeing the damage to the bridge I must say that the concrete does not look very well made and I'm suspicious. Not only do I find it hard to believe that the truck actually was carrying 160 tons, but by the looks of the bridge itself it looks as if the structure itself wasn't properly built.

Sounds to me like someone is trying to make a scapegoat out of the truck driver to draw attention away from the badly built bridge.

You know, there might be something in that. I hadn't considered it, but that actually would make sense.

[madd0ct0r]

After reading the article and watching the vid with it and seeing the damage to the bridge I must say that the concrete does not look very well made and I'm suspicious. Not only do I find it hard to believe that the truck actually was carrying 160 tons, but by the looks of the bridge itself it looks as if the structure itself wasn't properly built.

Sounds to me like someone is trying to make a scapegoat out of the truck driver to draw attention away from the badly built bridge.

yeah, especially since according to the article it's a steel bridge, and the vid shows a nicely obvious hanger beam in the concrete deck. Not to mention also according to the article the bridge dates from 1987. I don't think this is the EVUL CHINA GOVERBENT here. just idiot who ignore the weight limit. We get them all the time in Vietnam.

[Eulogy]

Honurable mention for a Darwin Award, or eventual winner? I suppose he was too impatient and/or careless, having a load almost three times the bridge's rated limit.

[Enigma]

i think it's actually 160 tonnes including the weight of the truck itself. I could have phrased it better but parsing " 160 tonnes including the weight of the truck itself" will always be an arse.

No, the article says "160 tons of sand". So it is 160 + weight of the truck.

[Winston Blake]

A quick calc can be done based on the image of the truck at the end of the video. Assuming the dimensions are similar to a 40 ft shipping container, then with dry sand having density approx 1.6x water, the weight of the sand is about 112 tonnes. However, it's open-topped and some of the sand is actually heaped. Further, it's not actually a shipping container, so its dimensions are not clear. Still, I would guess it's >100 tonnes of sand... on a 55-tonne max bridge.

[dragon]

Plus the 55 tons is that the max for a single vehicle or mutilpe, after all a single 55 ton truck is going have a different impact than 5 11ton trucks.

[Serafina]

Plus the 55 tons is that the max for a single vehicle or mutilpe, after all a single 55 ton truck is going have a different impact than 5 11ton trucks.

I'm pretty sure that bridge weight limits always count for the single vehicle. Read: No vehicles heavier than X tons.
So you should be able to drive over that bridge with 5 55-ton-trucks, because the weight will be distributed.
Of course that should also include large safety margins.

The reason is quite simply that you can not count on the drivers to account for the amount and weight of the vehicles already on the bridge, so you give a number that's safe even when a large amount of such vehicles would be on it.

[ComradeClaus]

It reminds me of that History Channel Show Ice Road Truckers, where they went to India...

Jesus Christy the roads in India are unspeakably bad. & they had to drive these flimsy, overloaded trucks over this nightmarishly warped wooden bridge.... repeatedly.

The govt built a nuclear arsenal & a HUGE military, but has roads & bridges in worse shape than the roman empires! And THAT'S taking into account 2 millenia of neglect & vandalism. You build decent roads BEFORE builing stuff like hydro dams! And the poor female driver had to deal with gawking by everyone in traffic & had guys gathering around her truck trying to pry the door open, I mean WTF?! Her teamates had to chase them away from her! You couldn't pay me a hundred grand to work a week in that cesspool. At least China seems like it's actually trying to upgrade it's infrastructure here & there. But it has to be matched w/ proper oversight & education.

[Sea Skimmer]

Huge military? Actually its tiny compared to the size of the country, with less active duty troops as the US with four times the population and military spending at 1.8% of the GDP, about the same as more European countries and a fair bit of its equipment still dating back to WW2 but keep on being an idiot. Indian certainly has problems but that isn't the cause of any of them, nor is it optional with Pakistan-China-Burma surrounding them. If you knew anything you might realize that after independence Indian deliberately pursued a policy of utterly minimal military spending, and only to have it turn into a disaster in 1962 and 1965. Then they built nukes because it was by far the cheapest way of securing the country and avoiding needing an eight or nine million man army like China had. Your idea that you don't need damns is a laughable, do you understand how irrigation works? Do you realize that when the US built the Hoover dam not a single paved road crossed the US? Nor for that matter did any paved road cross Europe at the time.

[madd0ct0r]

Do you realize that when the US built the Hoover dam not a single paved road crossed the US? Nor for that matter did any paved road cross Europe at the time.

sigged.

ComradeClueless, please feel free to start your own threads regarding Indian Development Policies and how they are proved wrong by a national geographic chanell doc involving a wooden bridge.

You do know wooden bridges are still common in America yes?
heck, you know we still have wooden rail bridges in the UK?

[aerius]

After reading the article and watching the vid with it and seeing the damage to the bridge I must say that the concrete does not look very well made and I'm suspicious. Not only do I find it hard to believe that the truck actually was carrying 160 tons, but by the looks of the bridge itself it looks as if the structure itself wasn't properly built.

Could be worse, at least they actually used concrete for the bridge instead of garbage and styrofoam.

[Sea Skimmer]

I'm impressed that bridge ever even held up against its own weight at all, clearly they used well compacted trash! Some day eastern China will have another big earthquake like Tangshan, only its going to kill twenty million instead of half a million. The only hope is they get as rich as Japan per capita in the next couple decades and can affording to just start methodically replacing a lot of existing bridges and buildings with ones that met the latest standards.

[Pelranius]

After reading the article and watching the vid with it and seeing the damage to the bridge I must say that the concrete does not look very well made and I'm suspicious. Not only do I find it hard to believe that the truck actually was carrying 160 tons, but by the looks of the bridge itself it looks as if the structure itself wasn't properly built.

Could be worse, at least they actually used concrete for the bridge instead of garbage and styrofoam.

They pulled off that crap in Taiwan too, during the big earthquake back in 1999, those reinforced garbage apartments simply toppled over. If anything, I doubt that contractors there have become more conscientious in the last twenty years.

How bad at cutting corners are South Korean building contractors? I've heard everything from people there that goes from China lite to German levels of quality control, so frankly I don't know.

[Phantasee]

That is a really long truck.

For reference, the triaxle end dumps here can carry a hair under 30 metric tons legally, a hair over if the truck doesn't have a sleeper. I'd say the maximum load without destroying it would be 40 tons, so 55 metric tons for the whole vehicle. Even our quad-axle wagons + truck-mounted box units weigh 56 metric tons (legally, on the road). I think I've seen them go up to 67 or 68 tons when hauling on-site and not going on public roads, but that was slow work and it was bad for the whole unit, engine, suspension, engine. Our biggest engines are 550 HP, most are only 475 HP and that's considered a little excessive! I wonder what they had under the hood of the Bridge Destroyer.