Construction Failure, 2nd Edition

Rating:
Summary: "Construction Failure: Government created?" by RexCurry.net
Review: "Construction Failure," 2nd Edition by Jacob Feld is a great book. The part about the Lacey V. Murrow bridge was especially enjoyable. In November of 1990, approximately 850 m (2,800 ft) of the 2020 m (6,620 ft) long LVMB, a 50-year-old floating concrete bridge over Lake Washington near Seattle, Washington, sank. It had been undergoing hydrodemolition for resurfacing which used water to remove asphalt to be replaced.

The bridge sank because environmentalists would not allow the discharge water from the hydrodemolition to drain into the lake, as exposed by the journalist Rex Curry. Consequently, in order to "protect the environment," the discharge water had to be stored in the very concrete pontoons of the bridge. That coupled with a storm and further water leakage led to the collapse of the bridge.

So, the "contaminated" water went into the lake -after the bridge collapsed. The contaminated water was joined by 8 of the bridge's 25 concrete pontoons, road construction material, asphalt, and lots of other debris.

It is unfortunate that this book is like most treatments of the subject in failing to even think about whether dumping the discharge into the Lake would have been a problem after all. It does note that a future project on another nearby bridge used planing technology instead of hydrodemolition for a similar project. Again, no discussion of the comparative "environmental" impact of the later technique.