The 35W bridge was brought down by too much weight from construction materials and pavement added to the roadway years before, a structural engineering expert reports in a paper delivered today at a world conference on steel bridges in Portugal.
Hassan Astaneh’s research concludes MnDOT and the consulting firm it hired could have prevented the collapse. Astaneh is a professor in University of California Berkeley’s Civil and Environmental Engineering Department whose work includes studies on the collapse of the World Trade Center for the National Science Foundation.
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Is the ‘corn boom’ expanding Gulf of Mexico’s ‘dead zone’?
Some fear an ethanol-fueled harvest in the Midwest may be behind the hard times for marine life at the other end of the Mississippi River.