Climate change could damage thousands of U.S. bridges, engineers say
It's based on a study from Colorado State University civil engineers Susan Palu and Hussam N. Mahmoud.
The abstract of the study (published last October) reads:
Bridges in America are aging and deteriorating, causing substantial financial strain on federal resources and tax payers’ money. Of the various deterioration issues in bridges, one of the most common and costly is malfunctioning of expansion joints, connecting two bridge spans, due to accumulation of debris and dirt in the joint. Although expansion joints are small components of bridges’ superstructure, their malfunction can result in major structural problems and when coupled with thermal stresses, the demand on the structural elements could be further amplified. Intuitively, these additional demands are expected to even worsen if one considers potential future temperature rise due to climate change. Indeed, it has been speculated that climate change is likely to have negative effect on bridges worldwide. However, to date there has been no serious attempts to quantify this effect on a larger spatial scale with no studies pertaining to the integrity of the main load carrying girders. In this study, we attempt to quantify the effect of clogged joints and climate change on failure of the superstructure of a class of steel bridges around the U.S. We surprisingly find that potentially most of the main load carrying girders, in the analyzed bridges, could reach their ultimate capacity when subjected to service load and future climate changes. We further discover that out of nine U.S. regions, the most vulnerable bridges, in a descending order, are those located in the Northern Rockies & Plains, Northwest and Upper Midwest. Ultimately, this study proposes an approach to establish a priority order of bridge maintenance and repair to manage limited funding among a vast inventory in an era of climate change.
UPI reports:
They studied simple steel-span bridges constructed with a deck on top of two girders and supported by concrete pillars. The bridges were mass-produced during the highway boom in the 1950s and 1960s.
Of almost 90,000 U.S. bridges studied, about 25 percent could fail within the next 20 years. Almost 30 percent of steel-span bridges could fail by 2060, and nearly all of the bridges will failed by 2100, the researchers predicted.
25% of 90,000 is 22,000+ !! YIKES!! The state of much of America's infrastructure is already crap, so this situation could only exaggerate that problem.
The last thing I want to see is another bridge collapsing into the river below. That is scary stuff.
When will our government start focusing on funding this type of public safety stuff rather than spending more money (that we don't have) on more and more entitlements?
Grace & Peace & Love to you all -
Matt
p.s. Keep this in mind from April 2019:
- There are 616,087 bridges in America
- Of those, 47,052 (nearly 8%) are "structurally deficient" and need urgent repairs
- 235,020 bridges (38%) need some sort of repair
- Americans cross structurally deficient bridges 178 million times a day, including such landmarks as the Brooklyn Bridge and the San Mateo-Hayward Bridge over the San Francisco Bay
- The average age of a structurally deficient bridge is 62 years