When Bridges Fail

Admit it though we are engineering students we are not so familiar of the issues about how bridges collapse in just one glimpse. The first failure of a bridge happened August 29 by the year 1907, The Bridge was in Quebec and it killed 86 people. This is one of the most remarkable catastrophes in the field of Civil Engineering. Through this tragedy, aren’t the engineers and the people involved in construction never learned their lessons? And still record of failure of bridges still soar and one of the latest failures of a bridge was the India Bridge killing more than 45 people last December 24, 2009.

Studies and researches are being carried out up to now to find more ways in preventing failure of bridges but still as mentioned earlier, there are still plenty of incidents occurred through the year caused by innumerable reasons yet still this failures always end up in hazardous effects to the society. The causes of failure of Bridges are classified into two categories, the Natural Occurrences and the manmade failures. Natural occurrences are by means of earthquakes, hurricanes, typhoons and the like. Climate and weather could also be categorized in Natural occurrences while damage done by a war, wrong choice of structural design, invalid computations of an engineer and wrong choice of materials are classified as manmade failures. It is feasible that human could be blame for the bridge failure because as a creator of the bridge they held the responsibility to their own creation so concluded here that man made errors are one of the major causes of a bridge failure. Sighted in the history is the 1940 downfall of the Tacoma Narrow Bridge cause by an absent analysis of Aerodynamics by the Engineers. Many tragedies prove that natural occurrences is one of the reason why there are failure of bridges , these are the Seta River Railroad Bridge Failure by the year 1934 collapsed due to a typhoon which killed 11 people and injured 216 people. The fall of the Honeymoon