Brett “Piece of Shit Thief” Favre can die in a fucking fire. What kind of horrible person thinks it’s acceptable to steal from poor people to help out their already rich family?
And good on Shannon for calling him out on it instead of defending an old colleague.
Not a bridge expert, or really any kind of expert, really. But railroad rails are laid with a little gap to account for thermal expansion of the rail on hot days. If the expansion is more than designed for, you get buckling like this. This bridge was probably also designed to account for thermal expansion to a certain degree. It seems like more and more of our infrastructure is starting to fail, encountering heat levels it was never expected to encounter. I wonder if failures like this and worse are going to become a common headline
According to Practical Engineering, tracks are no longer given a gap. The gap causes premature wear and excess noise. Instead, they lay the track under tension, and weld the joins between sections.
There is still a limit on how much heat they can handle before buckling, of course. I just thought that was a neat innovation.
Basically, yes, though I think they have special hydraulic pullers, too. I forget the exact name. They have to take special measures if the day is too cold.
Rail is laid at a “neutral temperature” calculated from the min and max temperatures of an area. They want the rail to not pull apart in the cold or buckle in the heat. If average temperatures go up that calculated neutral temperature goes up so rail laid at a lower neutral temperature are more likely to buckle.
This bridge was probably also designed to account for thermal expansion to a certain degree. It seems like more and more of our infrastructure is starting to fail, encountering heat levels it was never expected to encounter. I wonder if failures like this and worse are going to become a common headline
Bridge engineer here (not much experience, so I wouldn’t consider myself an expert, but I have more knowledge about it than the general public).
Your suspicions are correct, bridges are designed for thermal expansion. More of our infrastructure is starting to fail, and part of that is because it’s experiencing climate it was never designed for (heat, sea level rise, more drastic storm surges, etc). I would fully expect this to be a more common headline. At least for several more years, anyway. If the federal money from the infrastructure bill the US passed a few years ago runs out or is not allocated to the right structures, then this will only get more common. I don’t expect the Trump administration to champion an extension of these funds if they do run out. It was passed under Biden, after all.
As for this bridge in particular, this is a moveable steel bridge. The fact that it’s moveable means it is particularly sensitive to expansion (as well as salinity which causes rusting). Too much expansion, and the steel will get stuck in one position. In a typical steel bridge, if the thermal expansion exceeds what it was designed for, you end up getting higher stress levels in the steel as it pushes harder against the abutments. Usually this is alright in the short term, since we design these to withstand much higher stresses than it will ever likely experience. Repeated cycles of this, however, will cause fatigue failure (think of a paperclip or metal spoon snapping after you bend it back and forth a bunch).
Anyways, there you have it. I rambled for too long about this lol.
Edit: I don’t know many bridges, but I quite like the Millennium Bridge in Gateshead. (en.m.wikipedia.org/…/Gateshead_Millennium_Bridge) My dad took me and my siblings there when it opened. It was a big deal for the area and I was young enough to not understand why, so I looked at it real hard to try to understand why everyone was so hyped. I concluded that it was a pretty good bridge.
The fuck you did! Making the world a little less dumb, one ramble at a time, is a good thing. We don’t all need to be specialists in everything, but a brief summary like this contributes to our general knowledge and is a net positive.
Forbes has learned the shipping and business services company is using AI tools made by Flock Safety, a $4 billion car surveillance startup, to monitor its distribution and cargo facilities across the United States.
A four Billion dollar start-up? Great googly moogly.
If you calculate the worth of any startup company based on projected growth consistent with Amazon, Google, and Facebook every startup is worth billions of dollars.
Sure, sure, plus ours is checks notes . . . leveraging . . the power of AL. I mean AI. Yeah we’re totally taking AI, right, and, like, leveraging it. For . . monetization. Next-gen.
Flock Safety, here’s their self description from their website.
Eliminate Crime in Your CommunityTo solve and eliminate crime – you need evidence. Protect your community, business or school 24/7 with coverage that never sleeps. Empower your law enforcement agency to solve crime faster with Flock’s city-wide safety platform.
Flock’s city-wide Surveillance platform sounds more like it.
No wonder it has such a valuation, the government has a raging hardon at the prospect of constant surveillance and monitoring, nationwide.
You’re damn right they are worth billions. They synergized cognitive computing via blockchain with AI through sentiment analysis and deep learning. Just wait until they add a touch of intelligent automation, machine learning, predictive analytics, and natural language processing. Chefs kiss this unicorn is gonna be worth trillions.
I saw a video from Lehto’s Law about this yesterday. They operate in multiple companies and also work with Kaiser Permanente in the same way they work with FedEx.
I’m honestly surprised that Richmond, CA didn’t have ranked choice voting yet. Most of the surrounding cities, San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, etc all have it now. It’s no longer a fringey thing in northern CA.
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