Determining that it’s a material problem might be the worst outcome. I’d assume a lot of the steel came from the same source, and the same production run. If that’s the case, where would you even start?
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Infrastructure: Memphis I40 bridge over Mississippi river closed indefinitely after stress fracture discovered
- Thread starter crimsonaudio
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We were talking about this at the office. One of my partners mentioned seeing a clip angle that was connecting a beam to a column that was split from one end to the other at "L." It was a material issue. He said his thought was, well, those thing come in 40' lengths. Where all could the rest of that crappy angle be?
A lot of ASTM gr53 pipe is used in my industry. But unless you spec US made, getting the mill certificates is pretty useless.
Because of the building time frame, I assume it would all be US steel. However, also because of the time frame, I'd assume that tracing origin would probably be useless...
A lot of pipe "comes from" SE Asia. But a chunk of it is Chinese, so the certificates are basically forgeries.
Crappy pipe that isn't allowed on buildings is a known issue. When I say material issue, that's not what I mean. I just mean a fluke localized weird thing happening in the metallurgy. It's pretty rare but can happen. As far as tracing it goes, I can't imagine the benefit in doing that.
IDK if you're familiar with the Berry Amendment (US-sourced material requirement), but we ran into the same problem on a contract not long ago. We kept running into strange oriental items packed in with the other materials. The further we dug into it, the more obvious it became that everyone was cheating and we were expected to also. We were finally faced with letting the contract go, if we couldn't get a price adjustment...
Pencil whipping is an easy trap to fall into but absolutely a cardinal sin in the engineering world. Ever wonder why cascading failures are a thing? Because someone got lazy. "I'll just skip this one check or replacing this one fitting with a low probability of failure. What could go wrong?"
I saw this back in my petrochemical days. You’d look at an operators reading sheet and could see they were just dry logging numbers.
I was accused of it one time at Children's when I was a low level technician on a critical care monitor and the experience scared the hell out of me.
Director of Clinical Engineering calls me into his office and I see a module sitting on his desk. He is immediately hostile. "Your paperwork says you performed the PM on this monitor. You couldn't have. It was down for repair in another tech's office at the time you marked the PM complete."
I was flabbergasted. "I PMd a device with that identifier. There has to be a duplicate." I would have done no such thing as fake a PM on a critical care device. My ass and future employability were on the line then and there.
Turns out someone else got lazy when the device was catalogued into our system and the error wasn't mine. There was a duplicate ID on the floor. I had done the PM properly.
well, I guess that explains the rust where the beam was severed
Depending on who's doing project financing, Buy American is a requirement. USDA and the Texas Water Development Board are two I know of right off that require Buy American in their project financing agreements..
ETA. This is for public infrastructure projects (water)
I looked up Berry on Wikipedia and it appears to be specific to DOD
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It is. This was a contract managed by DLA. That wasn't my point. My point was that we were forced to blow the whistle on ourselves because our suppliers were clumsy...
When I was at UA in the '70s, I drove to and from my parents' home in Springfield, Illinois through Memphis (using the I-55 bridge) and up to St. Louis until the last times when more interstates made it easier to go to Nashville. Don't think I'd go through Memphis now unless I lacked an alternative. Although, I wonder how the bridge over the Ohio on I-24 is doing...
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