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this post was submitted on 30 Mar 2024
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chapotraphouse
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Oh for fuck's sake.
I'm nowhere near anything to do with engineering but if you've had a major structural failure then the absolute last thing that you want to do is to reuse that same structure because you just aren't going to be able to account for all of the potential consequences of the failure.
Steel is entirely recyclable. There's no good reason why they couldn't recover the steel from the trusses to recycle it, at least in a hypothetical situation.
I really struggle to imagine how the bottleneck on rebuilding this bridge is going to be the lack (?) of steel trusses, or how the additional requirements of extensive testing to ensure the safety of reusing the current trusses would alleviate the time it takes to rebuild the bridge.
Idk I'm no engineer but Musk's hot take here feels like the civil engineering equivalent of taking a cracked bicycle helmet, slapping some tape over it, and calling it good. I just can't imagine any engineer who deserves to hold a license that would want to touch this idea with a 10ft pole.
He's been doing it "successfully" for years and years so why not?
“Why would you have to do that? If it looks good, use it.” - Musk, probably
It's just a little ~~panel gap~~ truss gap
Tbh with how bad things are going with Tesla fulfillment I feel like Elon Musk's "Don't worry, it'll buff out bro" attitude is a bad angle to take PR-wise.
But if it hurts his bottom line, or that of his companies, then I'm here for it.
there's no way welding back together and straitening out a fat piece of metal would be faster or more efficient than melting the fucker & reforging it, is there? nevermind the safety i can't believe a team of welders reassembling metal jigsaws would beat the machined processes of a rolling mill
It would be hard to imagine a scenario where having a team trying to rehabilitate the damaged trusses and to (attempt to) get them to fit fairly narrow tolerances would be quicker than starting from scratch.
Not to shit on skilled labourers but I'd also expect this would demand a pretty uncommon skillset too - yeah, it might take at least a few weeks to get your new trusses forged and shipped to the location but are there really a dozen+ people with the right skills to be able to refurbish the current trusses who are currently unemployed and ready to fly out to Baltimore to start work tomorrow?
On top of all of that, I wonder if there are better construction methods available now that weren't at the time the bridge was constructed 50 years ago or if it would be considered viable to build something to meet the current infrastructure needs of the surrounding area - both possibilities would be ruled out if the only goal is to rebuild the exact same bridge asap using refurbished parts from the original bridge wherever possible.
It just seems so impractical from so many different angles and I'm not even close to being an expert on this.