White Bridge At The Site Of The Tragedy

2024 Author: David Durham | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 02:26

Renzo Piano presented a project for an overpass for his native Genoa, which will be built on the site of the collapsed one. He agreed to carry out the project free of charge - out of love for the city in which he grew up and a sense of "civic responsibility" (however, the specific conditions of cooperation between his RPBW bureau and the customer are not specified).

The tragedy occurred on August 14, 2018, when

a cable broke and one of the two central pillars of the Morandi Bridge collapsed. She dragged away a 200-meter section of the road, dozens of cars fell from a height of 45 meters, and they were covered with concrete slabs from above. The accident killed 43 people.

Renzo Piano tried to get away from the collapsed structure as much as possible. Instead of the cable-stayed bridge, it

proposed a girder, the roadway of which is supported by 19 supports with spans of 50 m. The project, according to Piano, turned out to be "simple, but not trivial." The ship is taken as a prototype - a symbol suitable for a seaside city. Under night lighting, a kind of sails will form over the bridge. The construction of the new facility will be handled by a consortium of three Italian companies: Salini Impregilo, Fincantieri and Italferr. The project cost is estimated at 202 million euros.

Among the reasons for the collapse are weather conditions and the poor technical condition of the structure. The overpass, built in the late 1960s to a design by Riccardo Morandi, required frequent repairs. There were so many of them that Antonio Brencich, a professor at the University of Genoa, a specialist in reinforced concrete structures, called it an "engineering failure" and recommended that it be replaced entirely. Morandi himself announced the problems: in 1979 and 1981, after examining his viaduct, he came to the conclusion that the roadway and support elements needed serious repairs. About a year before the tragedy, professor at the Technical University of Milan, Carmelo Gentile, had warned Autostrade, the overpass operator, about corrosion and other signs of possible deterioration, but the company, the professor suggests, "may have underestimated the importance of information." Now 20 people from the top management of Autostrade and its partner, Spea, are under investigation in connection with the disaster on suspicion of manslaughter.