News

Thanks Obama

You joke, but Kathy Hocul and Andrew Cuomo have been underfunding transit for over a decade.

This is absolutely a problem of "business friendly" Democrats diverting funding for basic public services to their corporate buddies at Amazon, across Wall Street, in the NYPD, and in the publicly subsidized sports arena racket.

We've got something north of a trillion dollars in deferred infrastructure maintenance. You see the edges of the problem in the whole Flint water crisis, when a cheapo state appointed city planner overruled the local government to pump untreated river water through aging leaded pipes. Or the Minnesota bridge collapse.

But this kind of underfunded domestic investment is everywhere. We've leeched vast stocks of wealth from our urban core and thrown it into our war machine abroad, and now our nation is crumbling under our feet.

Climate change simply accelerates the speed of the rot.

Are you kidding? This is infrastructure expansion!

In Switzerland a major highway got damaged by floods and they expect some valleys in the Alps to become uninhabitable. We are ahead!

At least it's effecting people responsible for climate change and not small tribes on far out islands like has been up to this point.

This bridge was probably also designed to account for thermal expansion to a certain degree. It seems like more and more of our infrastructure is starting to fail, encountering heat levels it was never expected to encounter. I wonder if failures like this and worse are going to become a common headline

Bridge engineer here (not much experience, so I wouldn't consider myself an expert, but I have more knowledge about it than the general public).

Your suspicions are correct, bridges are designed for thermal expansion. More of our infrastructure is starting to fail, and part of that is because it's experiencing climate it was never designed for (heat, sea level rise, more drastic storm surges, etc). I would fully expect this to be a more common headline. At least for several more years, anyway. If the federal money from the infrastructure bill the US passed a few years ago runs out or is not allocated to the right structures, then this will only get more common. I don't expect the Trump administration to champion an extension of these funds if they do run out. It was passed under Biden, after all.

As for this bridge in particular, this is a moveable steel bridge. The fact that it's moveable means it is particularly sensitive to expansion (as well as salinity which causes rusting). Too much expansion, and the steel will get stuck in one position. In a typical steel bridge, if the thermal expansion exceeds what it was designed for, you end up getting higher stress levels in the steel as it pushes harder against the abutments. Usually this is alright in the short term, since we design these to withstand much higher stresses than it will ever likely experience. Repeated cycles of this, however, will cause fatigue failure (think of a paperclip or metal spoon snapping after you bend it back and forth a bunch).

Anyways, there you have it. I rambled for too long about this lol.

Rail is laid at a "neutral temperature" calculated from the min and max temperatures of an area. They want the rail to not pull apart in the cold or buckle in the heat. If average temperatures go up that calculated neutral temperature goes up so rail laid at a lower neutral temperature are more likely to buckle.

According to Practical Engineering, tracks are no longer given a gap. The gap causes premature wear and excess noise. Instead, they lay the track under tension, and weld the joins between sections.

There is still a limit on how much heat they can handle before buckling, of course. I just thought that was a neat innovation.