GeotechSearch.com – New Geotechnical Search Engine!
I hope that GeoPrac is always near the front of the pack in the geo-industry when it comes to Web 2.0 and social media. With that in mind, I’m excited to announce that GeoPrac is finally on twitter! (http://twitter.com/geoprac/) You can use it as an alternative to the RSS feeds as each item posted to the site will show up in the twitter feed (with a little lag perhaps). But I also hope to start using it to interact with visitors and members and as a micro-blog where I post links to news items and stories that either didn’t lend themselves well to a GeoNews post or I flat out didn’t have time to write up. I admit I’m still discovering twitter, but feel free to drop me a tweet!
I also wanted to create a Widget for the items posted here, so I decided to use Widgetbox.com. I think it looks pretty slick with the teaser images I usually post showing up along with the post’s title. If you run a blog or website, by all means feel free to add it! Click through to see it in action.
On January 15, the National Transportation Safety Board released a safety recommendation letter report to the FHWA related to the I-35W bridge collapse in Minneapolis Minnesota that claimed the lives of 13 people and injured 145. The safety recommendations are based on the findings of an interim report from the FHWA Turner-Fairbank Highway Research Center that some gusset plates, components of the steel trusses, were undersized (not thick enough). This deficiency was confirmed to be a flaw in the design and not construction-related based on review of the original drawings from the 1960s and inspection of the wreckage. Whether this was a calculation error or a drafting error will perhaps never be known as only portions of the original design calculations were located. But the point is that it was never caught by any reviewers.
When this event first happened back on August 1, I remember being very shaken up by it. After my initial sadness for the victims of the accident, my first thought as a geotechnical engineer was: “were the foundations at fault.†As more information came out, it quickly became evident that the failure did not have anything to do with the foundations but that it was related to the superstructure of the bridge. But this still was something that profoundly affected me. (Continues…)
Copyright © 2007-2020 by Randy Post