The bridge was opened just a few months ago, but was recently closes due to recent landslides.
After you watch the video, you will note the irony of this statement:
“Currently, there is no estimated timeline for the reopening of the highway.”
Oops.
Geotechnical engineering is about ensuring the terrain under your project can support it, and the terrain uphill from your project won’t landslide down onto it.
It’s part art, but it’s mostly well understood science and has been for 50+ years. If the engineers do the work diligently and the managing architects accept any bad news when it’s delivered, then alter their plans accordingly.
As the article says, China has rather a lot of these sorts of “bad luck acts of Nature” compared to many other countries.
Speaking at a more meta level …
China is ruggedly mountainous and prone to amazing amounts of rain. Suggesting unstable terrain is rather common. AGW will almost certainly make flooding and landslides worse.
Although these things happen occasionally, even in the US, it still surprises me considering it was a relatively new bridge. I would expect something like this to happen in North Korea, not in China.
There have been two other bridge collapses in China this year, most recently in August.
That really surprises me. Maybe it shouldn’t.
A bunch of people were already unhappy about the quality of Chinese new builds. If anything, I expect the public reaction to be “meh – business as usual”.
On the other hand, Beijing has been centralizing power, and cracking down on historic (long past) corruption in order to do so. I’d expect more senior party members in the construction company to be clearing their desks.
That August collapse was a classic collapse-in-construction, but I spent a lot of time looking at it, trying to figure out how the bridge was supposed to work when completed. There’s never any engineering details in the news 
I always wonder if that kind of bridge is a “bowstring” bridge, or if it’s really a box-arch with a suspended roadway, and the horizontal members are just for stiffness.
Something which hasn’t been mentioned yet is that the reservoir is also new and they are still in the process of filling it. So things were OK when they started construction but they didn’t realize how much the water from the reservoir would spread and weaken the mountain.
China has entered the final phase of a major renewable energy project as the Shuangjiangkou dam in Sichuan province began storing water on May 1, newswires have reported.
All of that stuff is reasonably model-able / predictable. If TPTB are willing to listen to engineering advice that says this plan won’t work unless / until modified to account for [whatever] natural shortcoming in the worksite
Which willingness I’m going to bet is utterly lacking in most of China.
In Chinese there is this idiom “偷工减料”, which literally means “stealing/skimping on labor and subtracting materials”, ie cutting corners specifically on construction projects. I don’t know if there is a direct English translation. “Shoddy workmanship” would be close, except the Chinese one specifically applies to construction projects and not general craftsmanship – it happened so frequently that the phrase was a specific and popular shorthand.
in Taiwan at least, people would just throw their hands up and say that whenever a building fell after a typhoon or earthquake.
Wonder if it’s still a widespread phenomenon in greater China?
Will anyone be surprised if there are executions in the near future, just as there were over the tainted baby formula scandal in 2009?
Taiwan has more of a problem with “chabuduo” culture (“Eh, close enough”) than outright theft/fraud. The attitude that eventually leads to gas pipes exploding, buildings being crappy and stuff falling down.
I’m assuming that AGW means anthropogenic global warming? It did when I Googled it, anyway.
That video was quite interesting, that’s for sure.
Faulty bridges and dams in communist countries are usually the result of megalomaniac projects where the establishment forcefully turns specialists into yes-men who end up endorsing unrealistic solutions, especially when they’re young and ambitious. This can happen under any authoritarian rule, but I’m more familiar with these kinds of communist “achievements.”