The Suez Canal Crisis! – Massive Engineering Mistakes – Engineering Documentary
in Egypt a shipping catastrophe sends shock waves around the globe her size and her scale fundamentally changed what this event was going to be this event was going to have worldwide implications a devastating bridge collapse in Australia narrowly avoids tragedy it was an absolute miracle that people didn’t lose their lives so this is a huge story in Pennsylvania disaster strikes as a driver and his vehicle are swallowed whole usually you’ll see a tire something that goes into a small hole this actually encompassed the whole vehicle and in Louisiana failure on a crucial Crossing forces an urgent multi-million doll fix $30 million sounds like a lot of money but compared to human life you really just can’t put a price tag on that with big builds even the smallest mistake can be a huge disaster from miscalculations to misunderstandings some with deadly consequences these catastrophes are every engineer’s worst [Music] nightmare Engineers are constantly pushing the limits in both design and scale but if things go wrong a catastrophe like the structure itself can be Monumental like this disaster in Egypt a crisis on a global scale a blockage that was holding up billions of dollars of trade every day a supersized ship runs ground and a Race Against Time to find a solution the front of the ship is now trapped buried in the sand they needed to get the ship moved and fast and the world economy is brought to its knees she’s so large so big that when she kened out of control she effectively blocked 12% of the World’s Trade in one [Music] motion Egypt an ancient land full of Epic Feats of engineering when you say Egypt you might think of the ancient pyramids the Spinx but it’s also home to one of the most vital trade routs on Earth the sews Canal linking the Red Sea with the Mediterranean this Maritime shortcut dividing the continents of Africa and Asia is a true engineering Marvel completed in 1869 it took more than 10 years to build associate professor of History Dr Salvatore mogliano explains the SE Canal was a massive undertaking you had to dig 120 Mi 190 km worth of sand and dirt and it actually conjured up images of the Pharaoh building the pyramids they’re building a new pyramid but this pyramid links together two oceans in its more than 150 year history the canal has become one of the world’s most vital shipping lanes previous to the Suz Canal you had a circle around Africa an additional 15,000 miles in some cases and it was seen as the bridging of Two Worlds something that had never been accomplished before what the Suez Canal provided was a shortcut today around 12% of World Trade navigates the narrow channel in 2020 nearly 19,000 ships transited the sew carrying more than 1 billion tons of cargo as trade grew so did the ships on a mammoth scale like this the everg given the everg given is a giant among ships and can carry 20,000 containers it’s known as Suz Max the largest type of ship allowed through the canal almost as big as the Empire State Building these ships are pushing engineering to the very limit ever given is a/4 of a mile long 200,000 tons if you’re standing on the lower deck and you look up at the container stack you’re seeing 24 8T containers stacked one on top of the other with such vast ships navigating this narrow shallow stretch of water is no Cakewalk Steven turno is a professor of Maritime fluid dynamics the SE Canal it’s it’s very narrow there’s not much water between the the bottom of the ship and the bottom of the canal sort of the flow underneath the ship is forc through faster than it would normally do and that kind of sucks the ship down towards the canal bed known as the squat effect the faster the ship moves through the water the greater the effect is on the vessel and the deeper it’s forced to sail in the already shallow Canal suddenly it matters a lot that you keep within quite narrow bounds you don’t deviate to the left or right by very much and that makes it particularly challenging for Mariners to navigate through and to maintain the course that you want to go through safely with only about 9 M of clearance between the bottom of the ship and the canal bed any deviation can be catastrophic during the early morning of Tuesday March the 23rd 2021 the 400 met everg given on route to the Netherlands was in a convoy of ships traveling north was the fifth vessel in a 25 ship Convoy heading up the Suez Canal from the Red Sea into the Mediterranean loaded with 18,300 containers as the ship approached the entrance to the canal it encountered heavy winds and a sandstorm blowing from the West right from the outset the ship was struggling to stay on course the vessel was never in the center of the canal it actually maneuvered from bank to bank moving side to side getting really close to one side close on the other side having difficulty controlling its course it wasn’t just weaving the everg given was also accelerating it started to speed up progressively getting faster and faster sort of 7 8 9 10 plus knots at 7:40 a.m. the 200,000 ton ship crashed head on into the side of the canal plowing around 5 m into the Sandy Bank the everg given was stopped in its tracks what the vessel essentially did was Ram its bow into Asia the stern kept swinging northward it ran ground in Africa she was traversing The Canal at such a high rate of speed that when she kened out of control she effectively blocked 12% of the World’s Trade in one motion the figures are staggering it’s estimated that the everg given was holding up 3.3 million tons of cargo an hour or $6.7 million a minute the ship was completely wedged across one of the busiest trade routes on the planet her size and her scale fundamentally changed what this event was going to be this event was going to have worldwide implications and the world was definitely watching with the sez Canal completely blocked and ships and trade at a standstill the entire planet was searching for answers on average more than 50 ships a day navigate the Suz without incident and crucially without making headlines so the big question was why did this one get [Music] stuck examining the ship’s global tracking device revealed that something was wrong from the moment the ship entered the canal associate professor of History Dr salvator mogliano explains if you follow the track line of the vessel The Vessel was never in the center of the canal it seemed to have lost control control it actually maneuvered from bank to bank as the investigation began early reports suggested high winds were to blame professor of fluid dynamics Steven turnock explains that even for a ship weighing over 200,000 tons this can be a major problem with big container ships they’re sticking a long way up into the air if the wind is strong then you got quite large forces a wind was coming from its St naturally that once to turn the ship actually makes it more difficult to control not only were huge forces acting on the everg given from above they were also at Play From Below the vessel is so large that it doesn’t have a lot of water underneath it and it doesn’t have a lot of water next to it along the banks and that creates forces that act on the vessel as well as the squat effect pulling the ship deeper it was now being dragged towards the S too by another phenomenon known as the bank effect as the ship moves closer to the bank water squeezing between the two surfaces speeds up pulling the stern towards the canal side effectively turning the ship what we saw happen was everg got extremely close to the West Bank and she had to turn right and unfortunately she turned so hard right that it put her into the East Bank the bank effect was too much of a challenge you get away from that side but you then get in trouble on the other side while there’s little doubt this played a part in the wreck another question remained with the initial ships in the Convoy making it through why did this one speed up in the canal the everg was reported to be doing 13.5 knots almost 25 km per hour that’s more than 50% over the speed limit for this size of ship the pilots may have actually gone faster to try to get better control of the vessel the faster you go the more maneuverable Your Vessel is drive a car down a highway it takes only a small turn of the wheel to change lanes when you’re going fast the problem was when something goes wrong at that speed there’s very little margin for error with the rescue operation demanding help from across the globe plan a was to try and pull the ship free easier said than done as geotechnical engineers here Professor David White demonstrates wet sand is hard to escape so in civil and Maritime engineering we use physical models of systems a lot they’re quick and easy to make and we just we can just get a feel for the problem put it in a tank got some sand representing the sand bank and when it comes and hits the bank it pushes into the bank and the bow is buried dragging the ship backwards which is maybe the first thought you might have is very difficult cuz you’ve got the friction from that enormous weight resting on the front if you do a quick calculation maybe you’re going to need 60 or 100 tugs to pull the ship back the Egyptians scrambled very quickly they dispatched tugboats to the area and attempted to pull her off the problem was everg given being solidly a ground on the bow and Stern posed too much of a challenge and it wound up being that the Egyptians could not move the vessel at all with billions of dollars of cargo and more than 300 ships backed up on both sides it was time to go to plan B twisting it around is easier if you try to pull the stern of the ship to the side then actually the force you need is less maybe just a handful of tugs and this was the strategy that they adopted with larger anchor tugs and a specialized suction dredger Salvage teams were finally making progress this specialist suction dredger could shift around 2,000 cubic M of material every hour that’s almost enough sand mud to fill an Olympic swimming pool so once it was stuck on the bank up here the dredging here needed to remove the sand over at this side uh in front of where the bow is going to push the sand out to allow it to then rotate Not only was this one of the most expensive delays in history it was now also a Race Against Time and the tide to free the everg given they used all the resources at hand even the moon one thing that all Mariners are aware of are tides and in this case a fortunate spring tide was happening at the end of the month that best Hope was on the Sunday when water levels would be about half a meter higher than normal for just a few hours that gave Engineers a very real deadline to hit the combination of dredging and tugging with some help from the Moon finally paid off on Monday March the 29th at 3:05 p.m. after six long days the everg given was finally free and while it may be some time before we know the full story behind this crisis it firmly highlighted the world’s Reliance on these colossal containers we’ve experienced before hurricanes and disasters that temporarily shut down trade but never before before had we seen an accident shut down 12% of the World Trade and all of a sudden impact the entire Globe after dominating the world headlines for 6 days finally this cargo mega ship the length of four football fields was dislodged from the banks and on its way again gone but definitely not [Music] forgotten in big construction careful planning and preparation are key to every project even a slight mistake and the results can be catastrophic like this disaster in Australia that brought down a vital Crossing in the capital the amount of concrete the amount of Steel that was on the ground over such a large area I was shocked a fundamental oversight that went unchecked This Disaster could have been avoided and a catastrophe that barely escaped tragedy rocking the nation there was shock and amazement and then obviously it was everyone get to work canra Australia’s capital is home to the nation’s federal government as well as National museums and monuments local journalist Emma McDonald was born and BR in this Central City in 19001 um the search was on to find a place for the national capital now there was a big fight between the two biggest cities in Australia at the time and that was Sydney and Melbourne they both wanted to be the national capital so camell was in many ways considered a bit of a compromise that was sort of halfway between the two derived from an Aboriginal word meaning meeting place every last detail of canberra’s sprawling Metropolis was analyzed by City city planners and it worked cber is one of Australia’s fastest growing cities with its suburbs driving much of the population boom but as the city grew the roads were struggling to accommodate all the commuters especially in the northern suburbs like Garin one of the problems with camber being such a car Centric city is that the road infrastructure really needs to keep Pace with the population Booms that these areas have in gangar was a classic example where we had a lot of development a lot of new housing a lot of population wanting to move in straight away and the roads just weren’t equipped in 2009 to ease congestion work began on this interchange the 9 km galin Drive Extension running into the Heart of the City commuters frequently face lengthy delays any time of day the work to double the road from two to four lanes couldn’t come fast enough enough in total nine new Bridges would be constructed as part of the project including this one which would be built alongside the existing Crossing Michael Inman is a local reporter there was already an existing bridge and an existing Drive they decided to duplicate that so they could have a few different Landes going in each Direction so people could actually get to work one of the proposed Bridges crossed over cambra’s busiest and most important freeway the Barton Highway civil engineer Mike Evans explains the road over the top is the Garland Drive which is the main traffic Corridor going in a north south Direction on the west side of CRA the road beside me is the main Highway through to melbour closing this busy highway was not an option so like a lot of bridges across major roads this Crossing would be built in place known as cast in situ cast in situ would allow the busy Barton highway to remain open wooden molds known as formwork would be built in the shape of the bridge on top of the temporary steel bracing or supports the plan was to cast the entire deck in one pore and once hardened lower it into place alongside the existing Bridge creating a four-lane crossing the extension was vital not only to cra’s transport network but for the growth of the city as a whole Saturday August the 14th 2010 the concrete P was underway at around 150 p.m. workers were over 3/4 of the way through they heard a bit of a cracking sound and about 2 or 3 seconds later the bridge just gave out from underneath them a huge section of the bridge collapsed suddenly and without warning workers scrambled for their lives as hundreds of tons of wet concrete Came Crashing Down onto the road below some guys had time to run clear several guys went down with the bridge incredibly one worker managed to grab hold of a cement truck hose and clung onto it in midair for around 15 minutes until he was rescued with cra’s main highway now blocked details of the disaster quickly spread through every Newsroom in the capital journalist Emma McDonald was at work when word came through I remember all of us just been quite shaken because the people that were working on that project were people who lived in camber and everyone knows everyone in this city there was shock and amazement and then obviously it was everyone get to work this is a huge story as reporters and rescue workers rushed to the scene the scale of the disaster became clear when I first saw it I thought to myself you know what a mess I’d never seen anything of that size and scale to collapse like that the amount of concrete the amount of Steel that was on the ground over such a large area it it blew my mind to be to be totally honest I just thought that these things don’t happen in Australia while 15 workers were injured and nine hospitalized incredibly despite the devastation no one was killed those workers were just so lucky it was an absolute Miracle um given the catastrophic nature of that collapse that people didn’t lose their lives the disaster sent shock waves around the country and people wanted answers well everyone was interested everyone in camra was speaking about it so it was obviously a big story around town and nationally at the time as well the question then started be how did it happen why did it happen and what was the Fallout in a city famed for its planning and heavy Reliance on its Road Network how had such a seeming ly routine build gone so disastrously wrong we’ve got to figure out what happened make sure it doesn’t happen again but at the same time you you know there’s a highway that’s been blocked there’s a major road that’s been blocked so they’ve also got to get that moving so the rest of the town can get moving again an Engineers report commissioned by the Australian government quickly identified the source of the problem the steel beam supporting the wooden mold or formwork were missing a key structural element civil engineer m kevans was asked by the government to analyze the findings the beams on the temporary Bridge had no bracing and no stiffness and that lack of bracing and the instability of the beam reduced the carrying capacity of the beam this is a photograph of the temporary bridge and you can see from this that these are the longitudinal steel beams with the timber resting on them there is no cross bracing of any kind the investigation found that the steel girders supporting the form work weren’t braced to prevent lateral movement but when you’re pouring around 800 tons of wet concrete one thing you’re going to get is movement Engineers also discovered that the steel supports had been placed at a slight angle the beams have been placed at 3% to the vertical so that the rain could run off the surface of the road now gravity acts vertically so in effect the beams were carrying a sideways load at the top of about 3% of the vertical load which was the small proportion was a very sizable load it was more than enough to make the temporary structure unstable a combination of the lateral instability because it wasn’t braced plus the fact it was carrying a sideways load caused the beam to move over sideways and to bend sideways and then eventually to flip over essentially they didn’t have the weight bearing capacity underneath the bridge and the whole thing just crumpled out from underneath them further investigation also found that the welding of the top beam was insufficient what was critical in this case they only did a partial weld rather than going through the full depth of the metal but because of the sideways bending as well there was a tension on the edge of the top of the beam and that caused that to tear open if you look at this closeup you can see the r here where there was no world it’s only that little Edge there where there was any weld not a very good detail the report cited multiple structural and planning failures that ultimately caused the disaster in fact Engineers often talk about at the Swiss cheese effect where all the holes in the cheese have to line up to cause the accident and I think this may have been one of those cases where so many things went wrong all at the same time you had the end effect of the bridge collapsing during construction following the catastrophe Engineers were quickly deployed across the city to check all other Bridges under construction fortunately this flaw in the formwork was only found in this one Bridge the others being built around camra at the time were given the all clear in the aftermath new regulations were put in place for form work and the bridge demolished it took a month to clear all the debris away I think it took another four months until they could even start trying to construct it properly again and get the project actually finished a new Crossing was rebuilt and the Garin Drive four-lane Extension finally opened on October the 7th 2011 and it looks lovely now you go up and around and off you go um very very few traffic jams if ever with Lessons Learned and a new code of practice in place for form work hopefully disasters like this will be a thing of the past Australia has been nicknamed The Lucky Country in this case it’s a miracle no one was [Music] killed from the tallest Towers to our vast sprawling C cities engineers build to last but there’s no escaping the ravages of time like this disaster in Pennsylvania that struck without warning all of a sudden the road opened up and swallowed his SUV a massive sinkhole in the middle of a Suburban Street usually you’ll see a tire something that goes into a small hole this actually encompassed the whole vehicle leaving residents wondering how did this neighborhood nightmare [Music] happen eastn a small city in Pennsylvania owes its existence to the ground on which it sits Britany Sweeney is a local journalist Easton is a little town it’s really rich in natural resources like Limestone slate and iron ore the other great thing about and is it’s located in a region that has a lot of Highways so it’s easy to get products in and out of this area the city might be looking to the future but it can’t escape the past beneath its feet Which is far from solid geotechnical engineer Ward McMasters explains e is part of one of the Limestone belts that basically run across Pennsylvania and then dip down into Maryland known for sink holes characterized by by the Limestone Bedrock below Limestone just because of its geologic characteristics is going to have fractures and cross fractures and also what you’re going to have is voids within the Bedrock system because the more people you have the more water gets used which dissolves more Limestone when we exacerbate it by having larger developments concentration of people piping below the ground surface we cause increased levels of sinkles water dissolves the Limestone forming fractures and voids which grow into caves as the roof gets thinner and collapses the soil above is washed away creating a sinkhole the ground can be riddled with holes but from the street level you’d have no idea if you then build a city above them in time it can be a recipe for trouble Monday December the 30th 2019 on a Suburban Street in Easton this is a quiet neighborhood where not a lot happens as residents were going about their daily business all that was about to [Music] change from the footage this looks like a regular rainy day on a regular Street then the SUV kind of bumps and drops into a hole it’s [Music] surreal journalist Britany Sweeney knew this big hole was big news not a lot of people traveling through it’s not like it’s a busy road so the fact that in Sinkhole would open up and just driving down the road and then all of a sudden your car gets swallowed by a sinkhole that is an insane thought for a neighborhood like this it was more than that a young girl was watching from her bedroom window I couldn’t believe it that it was my dad’s car so I rushed downstairs my mom was in a panic her father was trapped Eastern fire chief Henry Hennings was on duty at the time when I pulled up to the intersection I saw the front end of the SUV sticking up in the air and that the original sink hole opened up right about this area here and it was pretty large it was probably 40t in diameter and it least is deep the hole was filling with water with the driver fearing for his life and I see a lot of water is going through that’s time I’m scared you know so I’m going to die right now luckily both the driver and passenger scrambled to safety it was a relief that it was a recovery and uh not a rescue we didn’t have anyone hurt which is always fortunate but the danger wasn’t over just yet once the the sinkhole opens there’s no way of knowing where it’s going to go or any way to stop it pretty much every built structure has foundations and if the foundations have been washed away under part of the road there’s a risk the same is happening elsewhere even under the buildings nearby when you have a sinkhole in a residential neighborhood any of the housing in the area is at risk houses on both sides of the street were evacuated and more was to come that first sinkhole was not the last a few days later as they’re working to fix the street an excavator fell right into the street into another sinkhole it was scary for the neighbors they said that it started to get to a point where they never knew when another sinkhole was going to open up under this street while this part of Pennsylvania may be famed for sink holes there were no known caves directly under the neighborhood Engineers ruled out mother nature something else must be at fault Easton had a water M break but the water main break wasn’t in the actual location where the sinkhole occurred with no direct flooding causing the sinkhole how had it opened up so dramatically when a water man breaks the escaping water can blast a hole under the road surface but sometimes like here the water tracks underground causing erosion further down the road that fracture Bec very active and 50 ft down the road 100 ft down the road all of a sudden we get a sinkhole that appears to have cropped out of nowhere but a lot of times they are interconnected just at depth the broken water M explained the sinkhole but the next question was why it had failed in the first place in the US there’s a water man break roughly every 2 minutes the basic reason is simple age like many water pipes in America this could have been a century old and back then most were made from cast iron cast iron piping can be susceptible to increased brittleness when we have cold water temperatures moving through it doesn’t have to be freezing anything below 40° will increase the brittleness of that piping the problem here isn’t the water pressure bursting the pipes but the cold temperature of winter making the cast iron brittle multiply that by nearly 100 cold winners and it’s no surprise that they fail once the water washes away the road’s foundations it’s only a question of time before a sinkhole appears this is really a scary thought for the people who live in this neighborhood in any neighborhood for that matter it’s not like it’s a street that’s heavily traveled it’s not a highway this is just a neighborhood road that is in a suburban area and for a sink holder to open up when someone’s just driving down the street is just scary to think about across the us there are more than 3 million kilm of water pipes much of them still cast iron yet since the 1960s one new material of choice has been ductile iron although installing it is an expensive and disruptive process what we want to do is when the budgets allow let’s go in and get rid of the cast iron piping and replace that with newer more updated materials that would be stronger and more resistant to the weather the graphite in cast iron is flaky and those sharp edges make it prone to cracking and doal iron however the graphite is rounded and that acts as a crack preventor so pipes made from doal Iron are stronger more malleable and more durable as well to make sure that we can maintain the stability of the roadways and the buildings to protect the health and safety of the people of those areas in a City built on soluble Limestone this sinkhole was a reminder of the risks of Aging Water Systems the US has a massive problem with aging infrastructure there’s no Silver Bullet but shocking events like this are a good reminder to everyone that one day nearly all of it needs repairing or [Music] replacing with all all bridges gravity can be an engineer’s biggest enemy but when other forces come into play the threat can be much greater like this near Miss in Louisiana on a crucial River Crossing this is an evacuation route it’s a route that needs to be kept open this fail had been brewing for decades and prompted a major rebuild $30 million sounds like a lot of money but compared to human life you really just can’t put a price down take on that an oversight with the potential to bring this Mighty Bridge Crashing [Music] Down New Orleans Louisiana more than a million people call the metropolitan area home in this low-lying city life is ruled by the water that surrounds it Autumn cafiero juy is an engineering journalist we’re in Southeast Louisiana this is an area surrounded by large bodies of water swamp land the Gulf of Mexico we’ve got the Mississippi River with half the city below sea level flooding is a very real risk whether from the Mississippi or storm surges from the Gulf we’re right in the path of hurricanes being right by the MTH Mississippi River if there’s a storm that’s large enough that could over toop those levies that’s when we have the bowl effect where the city starts to fill up with water New Orleans floods most years but when hurcan Katrina hit parts of the city were inundated for more than a month more than 1500 people died in one of the worst disasters in US history but the toall could have been higher more than 80% % of residents had fled New Orleans in the city’s first ever mandatory evacuation evacuating can be a very dramatic response but when you’re in the direct path of a hurricane moving can be the safest option and if the city starts to fill for most the only way out is by Road when you have something like a Katrina where you’ve got an entire metro area trying to leave all of your roads are going to be congested so having reliable roadways that you can use to get out of the city every possible artery is necessary with so much water to cross Bridges play a crucial role in the evacuation plan these Bridges across Mississippi they’re only a handful of them so they’re really vital because that is our way out of danger that is how we escape the city this key Mississippi Crossing about 40 km west of New Orleans is the hail bogs Memorial Bridge coming out of the city you go from suburbs to just swamp all of a sudden you turn on to 310 and then all of a sudden there’s this big beautiful Bridge kind of out of nowhere so impressive to look at completed in 1983 with a main span of around 370 M this was the third major Bridge of its type in the US Norma Jean matate is a professor of engineering there’s a very Innovative Bridge back in the 70s when it was designed it was the first cable Stay Bridge uh to be used to cross the Mississippi River uh there were cable stay Bridges uh in place in Europe and in other parts of the United States but a cable Stay Bridge Crossing the Mississippi had never been done one main challenge was to build a bridge that wouldn’t obstruct the busy shipping channel below you can see that the Mississippi River is a pretty wide river down here in Louisiana so you want to not have the substructure too close to the navigation Channel because you’re going to have major Oceano vessels pass it and should one lose control you do not want that vessel to to collide with your Bridge Pier with Louisiana’s famously swampy ground a cable Stay Bridge was the best solution to keep the shipping Lane as wide as possible the main Towers stand on Bedrock taking the strain of the 72 steel cables that support the road deck below those cables are protected by a polyethylene or plastic sheathing and you don’t want water to get in between the sheathing and the steel cable because that would cause rust back in the80s during construction the plastic covering the original cables started to crack before they were even erected Engineers were able to patch up 21 of them but it was too late to replace them completely the cables were already in tension so all they could do was try to repair them for now the plastic was heated to seal the cracks but the real damage had already been done in 1983 with the cracks repaired the hail bogs Bridge opened to traffic two decades later when hurcan Katrina struck the bridge stood firm and played its part as a vital evacuation route when I evacuated for Katrina I think we took the hell bogs bridge out of town because it was less jammed with traffic so it it really is important to getting people out just 2 years after Katrina another catastrophe further up the Mississippi raised red flags in 2007 the Minneapolis I35 Bridge also over the Mississippi River collapsed this was kind of a turning point for infrastructure in the United States hail bogs was newer and a completely different design but no chances could be taken this is when people really started paying attention to the state of our infrastructure and the fact that things needed to be repaired in 2008 the original cables went under the microscope with concerning results although the bridge could survive the failure of individual cables more than half were found to be corroding reducing their ability to carry the weight of the road below the amount of tensil force that a cable can carry is a function of its ultimate tensil strength and its cross-sectional area if you have corrosion you have just removed some of that cross-sectional area so you no longer have the same amount of area to hold that tensil Force although none of the cables failed the corrosion was far worse than expected if it hadn’t been spotted the results could have been catastrophic action needed to be taken and fast as Engineers investigated further they discovered the problem was being made much worse by Louisiana’s wet and windy weather the cables were very well monitored and what was noticed that in rainstorms the cables would vibrate and that was not something that was foreseen as wind from the storms caused the cables to vibrate it was creating stress and fatigue on the steel inside as well as cracking the anti-corrosion sheathing meant to protect the steel with more than 50,000 Vehicles crossing the bridge daily on one of the city’s main evacuation routes it was crucial this vital Bridge was fixed for good when they were repairing the bridge they really had to take into account evacuation traffic and loads and um figure out if the bridge could support that much weight cuz when you have an evacuation you’re going to have a lot of cars on the bridge and that puts a lot of stress and strain on the bridge in 2009 the decision was made to replace all 72 cables there was a lot of thought and design that went into how do we economically and safely replace the cables and not impact the ability to move traffic along the bridge now that’s a challenge because this is an evacuation route it it’s a route that needs to be kept open to keep the bridge operational the cables were replaced individually one side at a time and to prevent wind induced damage the new protective sheathing has a ribbed exterior Design This was an incredible fix every cable was successfully replaced one by one allowing the bridge to remain open to traffic throughout now now the bridge was better than new but the fix hadn’t come cheap $30 million sounds like a lot of money but compared to human life that could have been lost if it hadn’t been repaired I mean you really just can’t put a price tag on that work was completed in 2012 and the new cables are set to last for 34 of a century knowing that it’s been repaired that it’s got you know a new lease on life and 75 years of lifespan is is really reassuring and I think it’s going to be reassuring to the people who use this bridge all the [Music] time
Massive Engineering Mistakes – S03 E09
Dive into a dramatic crisis at the Suez Canal, where a single ship blocked global trade and sparked a worldwide economic frenzy! Discover the intense challenges of maritime navigation that turned a giant vessel into an international spectacle.
——-
Massive Engineering Mistakes is a riveting series that explores the daunting realm of architectural blunders and engineering catastrophes. From gravity-defying towers on the brink of collapse to bridges built upside-down and airports slowly sinking into the sea, these ambitious missteps redefine the boundaries of scientific innovation. Yet amidst chaos, the genius of human ingenuity shines, crafting solutions as awe-inspiring as the disasters themselves. Unveiling the precarious balance between triumph and failure, this show offers a thrilling journey into the world of spectacular engineering errors and their extraordinary rectifications.
——-
Welcome to Banijay Science, your premier destination for full-length scientific documentaries and intriguing tales from the realms of engineering, technology, and beyond. Banijay Science showcases real-world applications, top-tier documentaries, and award-winning TV shows that engage and enlighten.
Immerse yourself in the captivating world of science and engineering, with content from renowned series like Mythbusters and Abandoned Engineering.
Subscribe to our channel and stay updated with every breakthrough: https://www.youtube.com/@BanijayScience?sub_confirmation=1
#fulldocumentaries #sciencestories #factual #science #engineering #technology
3 Comments
Banijay Science, I really enjoyed this video, so I hit the like button!
I remember the Suez canal blockage.
Thank you. ❤