Turtles; all the way down.
Awesome.
IIRC during WWII the Allies developed a bomb that was good at taking down bridges. I guess it was make to penetrate the ground before detonating so that all the force went through the ground making a miniature earthquake. With this you didn’t have to hit the target, just be close.
The cables might be strongly embedded in concrete, but if the ground beneath the anchors falls away you might have problems.
You’d do it with a bridge jack, of course.
The posts mentioning main cable corrosion reminded me of a TV program about the new Akashi-Kaikyo Bridge in Japan.
It was designed with air conditioning units that blow dehumidified air thru the cables to prevent any chance of corrosion.
Darn, I just now realized that I’ve responded to a 2 year old thread. :smack:
Moderator, please delete these replies before I am hounded by ridicule. :o
Too late!
It’s late in the day and I’m tired. Consider yourself hounded.
[yawns]
“Cry havoc! and let slip the dogs, etc.”
[yawns]
Great post + user name combo!
It is that untimely? My friends walked home across it yesterday after the East Coast earthquake. I am very interested in the structural integrity of this bridge.
points and laughs
Years ago, I had the privilege of walking across the Brooklyn Bridge with a friend of mine who was a civil engineer, and who had studied the bridge.
He pointed out the redundancies: the fact that there were four main cables, vertical suspension cables connecting the roadway to them, and diagonal cables from the towers connecting the roadway to the towers. He pointed out the “box”: the fact that the roadway was not flat, but was the upper portion of a box, supported and strengthened from beneath, that would prevent the “twisting” of the roadway. He mentioned Roebling’s “over-designing” of the bridge; and some time later, showed me a video of the destruction of the Tacoma Narrows bridge and invited me to compare what I noticed on the Brooklyn Bridge with what I noticed occurring in that structure during its destruction.
In short, the Tacoma Narrows bridge had only two main cables, there were no diagonals, and there was no box to prevent twisting. The Brooklyn Bridge, on the other hand, had all these things, and more. His opinion was that the Brooklyn Bridge would stand for about a hundred years without maintenance. With proper maintenance under current use, it could last forever.
The collapse of the Tacoma narrows bridge was due to resonance vibrations, that’s not at all a relevant comparison.
Knowing nothing else about it, I don’t either. But when you consider that the bridge is designed to be arched, and that the people have flattened it out, it becomes a little unnerving. You could certainly design a bridge that is designed to be flat, rather than arched. However, the Golden Gate is not so designed. It is designed to flatten under heavy loads, but that’s a safety feature, not something that you want to be doing regularly.
I remember reading that just before Mt. St. Helens erupted, the seismologists and vulcanologists who watched it carefully for months saw nothing wrong visually because it changed so slowly. It was only when they brought in a local expert who knew the mountain intimately but had not been there recently that they realized that the mountain was bulging so much that the difference could be detected with the naked eye.
I have read that the deck truss…the ‘box’ previously mentioned…is strong enough that it would not fall if the cables were severed. It would sag, but remain intact.