This is a different perspective on landslides than what I usually blog about on GeoPrac. This banking and insurance website blog post discusses what should and shouldn’t be covered on a car owner’s insurance policy. Several cars parked along the road were damaged after a retaining wall / slope failure in Baltimore last month. [Source: Read the blog post at Bankrate, Inc.. Image: CBS Baltimore]
[Update 4/13/12] A verdict in favor of HDR was reached earlier this week. They have been exhonerated of the charges and will pay no damages to Tampa Bay Water District. Read more on this GeoPrac.net […]
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…)
A failing retaining wall in Cincinatti is applying enough pressure to an adjacent brick apartment building to actually move portions of the building sideways by about 1-inch. You have to love brick buildings for forensic […]
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