This bridge is of the rare full-concrete type whereby not only the pyloons are made of concrete but also the "cables".
It has also only 4 cables per pyloon, meaning that if something goes wrong with one cable, everything goes wrong.
It was build in the 60ies when calculations had to be done manually, and multi cable pyloon bridges, buiding a structural safety in the design for failure of one cable, were difficult to calculate in full.
=> the bridge was state of the art when it was build, but the concept was rare and not used later on anymore for good reasons.
Outdated engineering is likely one cause.
Maintenance is worthwhile to investigate because of the lessons learned. And this picture of the bridge before the collapse gives a weird feeling:
It must also be a weird feeling to cross bridges if you consider all the concrete frauds in Italy, where the construction mafia sold concrete with lesser cement than specified.
As such there is a safety factor in the strenght of concrete that was not foreseen and calculated in bridges build in the 20th century, because the concrete normally used in these construction strenghtens over decades with some 20%.
At least in Dutch bridges, where this effect gives most concrete viaducts and concrete components of bridges another two or three decades longer lifetime.
Perhaps we should also recognise that engineering of bridges is still a knowledge field with progressive insight.
It is however up to the local governments to choose the balance between cost and safety. To choose for "better safe than sorry" or a lesser level.
Privatisation like it happened in Italy seems to me the wrong choice.
But even if the quality and the safety is in the hands of the state..... in Spain the records on safety of the bridges are not public but officially a state secret.
As side notes:
There is a similar bridge from the same engineer in Venezuela, build 6 years earlier, only much bigger....
When the issues of these old bridges are well known (enough reports on that in the countries and in the case of Italy flanked by civil society and the EU)... when those issues are clear.... how can it happen that Italian banks had enough money to invest in a shaky Turkey and not in their own country ?
I saw in an article that the total replacement cost of logistics infrastructure in my country equals roughly
the GDP 60% of the GDP of one year. If Italy is really going to adress the situation, having already a national debt of 130% of GDP, and having as well a lot of money invested by its banks in shaky foreign economies, having Climate invests to do as well...... how much money will be left for this new government for the slogans they used to get so many votes ?
How ill adviced on economical issues are these parties.... or how deceiving their election campaign ?
This is really something where good informatiuon to the public is important. Not the juicy political infightings, but boring solid good info on your country.
