The design firm is ultimately responsible, and should bear the brunt of the blame in this situation, and all of their designs should be reconsidered and recalculated at this point. If they had recalculated their results, double tested, or even asked for another opinion, the tragedy might not have occurred, and at the heart of this is the ethical question, was the miscalculation intentional, or was it just a huge mistake? That needs to be investigated now, along with the cause, so that the public is assured that flaws like this one do not continue, and if flawed bridges exist, they must be inspected and ultimately rebuilt to higher standards. Another important aspect of this ethical problem is the acceptance of "Structurally Deficient" bridges by the NTSB, where they know bridges have problems, but their rate those problems and decide whether the bridge can remain open or not. The nation's infrastructure is crumbling, there are probably many more bridges out there, just waiting to collapse, that is wrong, and the American people should not stand for it. The moral lesson here is that testing needs to be beefed up on engineering and design firms, and that there needs to be some sort of second opinion or oversight on the part of these firms, especially when they are designing structures that people will rely on for decades. This bridge was flawed from the start, and it was just an accident waiting to happen. The nation needs to make sure that does not happen again. Writer Flynn continues, "The blind eye that taxpayers and our elected officials have been turning to the imperative of maintaining and upgrading the critical foundations that underpin our lives is irrational and reckless" (Flynn). Ethically, the people...
"The Collapse." MyFoxTwinCities. 2007. 27 Oct. 2008. http://media.myfoxtwincities.com/special/35wbridgecollapse/index.htm
Failure analysis report: The I-35W Mississippi River bridge collapse Given the existence of safety codes within the United States as compared with the developing world, it might be assumed that a structural failure would be a relatively rare event. However, a remarkable failure occurred within the nation's heartland, in the form of the I-35W Mississippi River bridge collapse in 2007. As noted in an editorial in the LA Times: "the collapse
The epoxy supplier knew full well that his brand wasn't good for the long haul and assumed the construction bosses knew that too -- but they did not know that. So, the bottom line is that the I-35W bridge "apparently lacked the kind of redundancy planning that is the norm today," Teschler asserts. And since the I-35W bridge was designed in the 1960s it went online prior to the ASCE
Case Study: The Minnesota Bridge/ I-35W Collapse of 2007 Intro The Minnesota Bridge/ I-35W rumbled with high traffic during the rush hour when it dropped 60 feet down (or more) into Mississippi River in 2007, August 1st (Sander & Saulny, 2007). More than 50 vehicles went into the river with the passengers inside. According to Jim Clack from the Fire Department of Minneapolis, more than seven people got killed while an excess
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