Highways aren’t fireproofed in the way homes are. Should they be?
But if the human need for speed trumps any internal instinct that says, then surely many people are wondering: When can we fix this thing? Roughly 160,000 vehicles traversed the bridge daily, and it is now unusable in both directions.
The first thing commuters should know is that collapses like this one really are exceedingly rare. “It was a freak accident,” Abieyuwa Aghayere, a professor of civil engineering at Drexel University, told me, laying out what he thought likely caused the collapse. The bridge was only 10 years old, Pennsylvania’s secretary of transportation, and was up to current standards. Aghayere suggested that a “perfect cocktail” of flammable gasoline, relatively lackadaisical bridge fireproofing standards, and the heating of the bridge’s steel supports could have done. Aghayere, who happens to teach a graduate-level course on failure analysis, explained that “it’s not that a bridge doesn’t have any fire resistance—it has some. But because people don’t live on a bridge, we don’t necessarily fireproof” in the way we would a home, and the steel that you can see on the underside of a bridge will often lack the same fire-resistant coating that steel inside a building would have. When it heats up quickly, it can become malleable, bend, and finally collapse. Going forward, Aghayere would like to see better fireproofing on overpasses and bridges. An intumescent coating on steel girders and beams “can delay the loss in strength for many more hours” during a fire, he says.While officials say a precise timeline for rebuilding the bypass is unknown, on Tuesday they did share a general. Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro issued a proclamation of disaster emergency, allowing the state “to immediately draw down federal funds and move quickly to begin the repair and reconstruction process,” he announced. U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said the recovery would receive significant federal support. At a press conference, Shapiro touted a public-private coalition of tradespeople, construction firms, and state and federal agencies, andto “backfill” the gap in I-95 and build a temporary six-lane roadway over the collapsed portion of the road while the full rebuilding takes place. Demolition of the collapsed site was expected to be finished Thursday, Shapiro said. There is now
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