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Italian bridge collapse

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I was watching How It's Made the other day and they were making bridge sections.

 

Before they pour the concrete they tension the reinforcement cables to a ridiculously high amount (tonnes rather than kilos). Once the concrete has set, they take the weight off the cables and leave them trapped in the concrete under tension which has the effect of strengthening the whole system.

 

A structural engineer on C4 News this evening was saying that if even one of these cables breaks, the transferred load to other parts of the concrete can be enough to destroy it. Given that one of the recurring problems with this bridge was the concrete towers cracking, it's possible that rainwater got into the cracks and corroded one or more of these cables. The fact that Genoa is on the coast means that a fair amount of seawater was probably also blown onto the bridge structure.

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I presume that you understand the phrase “breaking news”. And the phrase “over twenty dead”.

 

Maybe reserve the lame attempts at humour for a more appropriate thread.

As I told the BBC when lodging a complaint, it was a woefully crass headline. Don't you agree?

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