Ageing infrastructure is a world wide problem. In Au where water shortage is nearly always a concern, about 15% of our water supply is lost in leaks in the distribution system. We have a population of about 20 million in a land mass about the same size as continental USA, so you can see we are a small population paying to run a big country.
After the bridge collapse in Minnie, authorities here are rushing to cover their butts and make sure nothing similar happens here. The Westgate bridge, which connects East and West Melbourne over the Yarra river, was built in the 1970s and today was declared structurally unfit. It was announced today that the bridge was engineered for 40,000 vehicle crossings per day, it now gets 160,000 crossings per day. Trucks are now larger and heavier, too.
This resonates with me personally for a number of reasons:
- I regularly cross the bridge when I visit my parents and sister,
- I used to live near it
- the Westgate bridge has already collapsed once, in the 1970s when is was still under construction, and my Dad was working under the bridge when it collapsed. (He wasn't hurt, but many workmen died that day.)
The Westgate was originally designed to be a very "sleek" bridge, it had to cover a wide river mouth and had to rise very high as large ships had to pass under it. The idea was the road would rise like a ribbon supported on very tall concrete pylons. The bridge construction started from both ends at once, the plan was to meet in the middle. Unfortunately there were some engineering errors and as the two ends approached, it was apparrent that they were NOT going to meet. The construction company tried to force the ends to meet using heavy weights, it ws not successful and when they removed the weights, a section collapsed killing 35 men. My dad was a construction foreman at Webb Dock which is below the bridge, we did not know if he had been hurt till he got home that night.
The bridge was eventually completed, and has large steel pylons and supporting cables above the road level, which are extra strengthening added to the original design. For this reason I ws very surprised to hear today that it is now considered to be overloaded. The state government is considering banning large trucks from it right now.
Railways are another concern - the Warrnambool to Melbourne train, which I use occasionally, derailed a year or two ago due to lack of maintenance of the tracks. In AU the railways are mainly government owned, except in my State, the metropolitan railways are leased to a private company and one country line, the Warrnambool line that services my area, was sold off to a private company. The maintenance on that line was cut back to lower costs, eventually it deteriorated to the point that the train de-railed. Luckily, IIRC, no-one died and few were injured. Shortly afterwards the company relinquished the line and it is once again operated and maintained by the State owned rail service VicRail.
Chris
