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This week, the White River Bridge in Beijing's Huairou district collapsed when a truck weighing approximately 160 tons tried to drive across it.
Built in 1987, the White River Bridge was Beijing's longest steel arch bridge, and was designed to hold vehicles weighing no more than 55 tons. Thankfully, nobody was injured when 200 meters of public infrastructure collapsed yesterday morning.
5-31-2011
You might be tempted to think this is yet another of those mysterious sinkholes that have been appearing around China, but nope, this is really just one giant gaping hole on a bridge! On Sunday morning at 3.30am in Changchun, this unfortunate truck driving across a bridge over Yitong River fell through the fracture, injuring the driver and another passenger. Was the truck overweight or was the bridge just shoddily constructed with substandard steel? We're inclined to think it's the latter.
07-12-2011
Only a day and a half after it was opened, a newly constructed highway in Kunming, Yunnan province collapsed on July 10, killing two and injuring two others. It's being called the "shortest-lived highway ever." While rain was largely blamed for the collapse, it is obvious to observers that both proper testing and proper construction safety measures hadn't been undertaken.
22 dead after road bridge collapses in China | Mail Online
A road bridge on the verge of completion in China has collapsed, killing 22 people and injuring 22 in a possible indication of safety standards ridden rough-shod in the face of breakneck economic development.
At least 39 people were missing after the 320-metre (1,000-ft) bridge spanning the Tuo river in Fenghuang county, in the southeastern province of Hunan, collapsed last night during the evening rush hour, even as workers were stripping it of scaffolding, Xinhua news agency said today.
In an absurd twist of fate and a rather distinct and unusual statement on the need to recycle, residents of Shanghai got the surprise of their life when earlier this month a major new bridge collapsed, revealing its components to be mostly rubbish and not concrete!
FUZHOU, July 14 (Xinhua) -- One person was killed and 22 others were injured after a bridge collapsed Thursday in east Fujian Province, according to local authorities.
The accident happened at around 8:50 a.m. when a section of the Wuyishan Gongguan Bridge collapsed in the city of Wuyishan, said a spokesman with the city's committee of the Communist Party of China.
A tourist bus, carrying 23 people, fell off the bridge, said the spokesman, and the injured were rushed to the hospital.
Designed by Fujian Provincial Traffic Planning and Designing Institute, the steel arch bridge is 301 meters long and 18 meters wide. It is a vital traffic hinge linking the Wuyishan Mountain Resort and the 101 Provincial Highway.
With a total investment of 17 million yuan (2.6 million U.S. dollars), the bridge's construction by the provincial forest engineering company started in November of 1996. It opened to traffic on Nov. 20, 1999
China State Construction Engineering Corp. (601668), the nation’s biggest builder by market value, intends to buy a U.S. construction company next year as it begins investing as much as $2 billion in the world’s largest economy.
The builder has shortlisted two potential takeover targets, including one with annual sales of about $1 billion, Vice President Chen Guocai said yesterday at a conference in Hong Kong. He declined to elaborate on the companies or on how much the builder may spend on its first U.S. acquisition.
China State, which renovated the Alexander Hamilton Bridge in New York, also plans private-public partnerships in the U.S. over the next five years to help pare its reliance on domestic and emerging markets. The company wants to boost the proportion of overseas sales earned in the U.S. to 15 percent from 5 percent within five years, he said.
“We need to balance our overseas business,” he said. The so-called Arab Spring movements could disrupt sales in Africa and the Middle East, where the company has been “very successful,” he said....
One company under the name of Jiangxi Changxia Construction Engineering Group handed out the actual building work for bridges and tunnels to a number of migrant worker squads with no qualifications or experience in railway construction. Lu Tianbo, who used to work as a cook, ran a restaurant and built roads, led a dozen migrant workers in constructing the rail line's No. 2 bridge, although he admitted he had no experience performing such engineering work, Xinhua News Agency reported. The workers responsible for building the No.3 bridge and the Shengli village tunnel were also migrant workers, Lu said, adding that no one ever checked their qualifications.
What's more, almost two years into the construction work, the Jiangxi Changxia Construction Engineering Group suddenly announced last September that it never signed a contract with China Railway No. 9 Group for the railway project, and fraudsters who had forged the company's seals and documents had contracted out the work.
Xinhua News Agency reported late last month that to cut costs, builders mixed rubble with the concrete in the bridge's pier foundations. The report said they transported stones from nearby quarries and dumped them into the foundations. China Railway No. 9 Group had issued a punishment notice dated July 2010 to the fake Jiangxi Changxia company, but the practice was not stopped, Xinhua reported.
The report quotes railway design experts as saying that the bridges with pier foundations filled with rubble were in danger of tilting or collapsing in the future after the railway opened..
Bwaha, and these guys are building bridges for us? This is what I try to point out when I say, America will always have a strong manufacturing sector. Because they do fine with Marti Gras beads and such, but not the real work...
^^
I heard Roebling had trouble getting quality steel (because of fraud) for his 19th century bridges. The Chinese are doing what we've have been doing for centuries--America taught them well.
BTW, a 160 ton truck would collapse more than a few US bridges...isn't the (unpermitted) max truck weight about 40 tons here?
The interesting thing about those pictures is it shows true Chinese culture. Chinese people half-ass and screw over whomever they can. They have a complete disregard for rules and regulations.
Throwing trash in cement to reduce their costs, even though they know that it's wrong, is a good example. Driving a 320,000 pound truck is another. Go to Chinatown in NYC and the Chinese stores are almost all "cash only" and the ones that aren't have a $10+ minimum to use a credit card, when that is strictly forbidden by the CC processing companies. They just don't care, and are tax cheats as well. They play by their own rules.
The Chinese are exceptionally smart however. As with anything, a mutt, or blend of culture is good for everyone. Many doctors are of Asian decent and grew up here in our culture, and they make excellent doctors.
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