Hernando de Soto Bridge Crack

[jimfols]

The Hernando de Soto Bridge on Interstate 40 was shut down Tuesday for emergency repairs after transportation officials discovered the crack in the bridge during a routine inspection. On Wednesday, the US Coast Guard put a waterway restriction on the Mississippi River below, leaving at least 24 vessels with 346 barges waiting to travel in either direction, according to Lt. Mark Pipkin of Coast Guard Sector Lower Mississippi River.

[jimfols]

Here's a few more photos.

[Ralphxyz]

Wonder if they can/will realign the beam or just scab some plate over it?

Ralph

[jackhoying]

Wonder if they can/will realign the beam or just scab some plate over it?

Ralph

I was thinking the same thing. I would guess that the main focus now is if this beam failed in this manner, others may have the same fate in the future. They'll spend more time investigating that they will fixing it.

[wizard69]

Most likely a temporary repair, bridge restrictions and so forth until they can fabricate new beam and plates. I know locally they replaced entire beams just showing some stretch in the bolt / rivet holes. The problem is simply if something happened the patch would get a lot of criticism so we are likely to see everything replaced.

[thevillageinn]

Wonder if they can/will realign the beam or just scab some plate over it?

Ralph

Since that one guy was tied off to the section which needs to move, I figured he would hang below it while his buddy drilled some holes to scab on a plate

[NeiljohnUK]

Interesting cracks in the concrete balustrade support (going by the drilled holes there was probably a rail before that's been removed) on the road deck side, related to the failure?

[wizard69]

They are likely engineers at this point, possibly surveyors. On a local bridge surveyors worked for weeks figuring out how the shape of the bridge changed and what was the likely cause. At the same time you have engineers involved to make sure no error in construction happened and that the engineering was correct for the bridge design. Most likely specialist in failure analyst is also involved. This is actually going to be a long process as they will need to make sure nothing else is near failure. Beyond that more than just the broken beam will end up getting replaced.

Whatever is going on I hope this thread continues to receive reports and pictures of the whole process of getting this bridge back into operation. I find these sorts of mega repairs to be most interesting.

[Moldyjim]

Interesting, It looks like it was sideways stress that caused the break rather than vertical.
Wonder if the alignment end to end was off and forced together.
Or land slippage?

[jimfols]

Here's a couple more photos,