Pedestrian Bridge Collapse over SW 8th Street in Miami [pdf]
What went wrong technically to cause the bridge collapse is only the second half of the story.<p>The first half of the story is that the stakeholders wanted an over-the-top bridge design, complete with fake cable stays, and out of hubris decided they would use an all-concrete single-truss Accelerated Bridge Construction (ABC) design because all-concrete would look better and the university's (FIU's) engineering department sort of specialized in promoting ABC.<p>What could have been a much cheaper nice looking normally-designed bridge (which would be open today) ballooned (or you could say, was hijacked) into a $10mm+ bridge disaster that would be comedy if people hadn't been hurt and killed.  A majority of it was even paid for by federal grants.[1]<p>This is why we can't have nice things.  They were so focused on building a nice looking bridge — and meeting deadlines — that they didn't/couldn't allocate sufficient resources to verify the design, verify it was built and moved into place correctly.<p>[1] see page 9 of <a href="https://www.transportation.gov/sites/dot.gov/files/docs/briefing-room/306576/amendment-2-ga-tiger-v-fiu.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.transportation.gov/sites/dot.gov/files/docs/brie...</a>