All the comments are union bashing, nice.
In our area we have a number of small bridges crossing 20' to 50' (at flood stage) creeks that are under need of repair/replacement.
One bridge, when the road was closed because it was about to collapse (in some minds),was replaced on adjacent private land by the farmers in two days with a concrete deck structure sufficient to be used for combines and large farm equipment but not tractor trailers.
Who did it ?
First clue was the persons building the bridge had black hats and were from the local Menonnite community who stop formal education at Grade 8.
Those of our profession who are fortunate to work in this community can certainly benefit from their ability to not let too much education get in the way of common sense.
As one Old Order told me : "If you haven't got it by Grade 8, it's too late".
We presently have a bridge being rebuilt that would take about a month to do by the above group that has dragged on inconveniencing many persons for nearly a year as the engineer gets paid a percentage of monitoring time 't'would seem.
Why aren't four caissons drilled, two pre-stressed pre-cast concrete beams swung into place, followed by a deck with side rails ?
Percentages ??
YOS
DGG
Unions don't build roads.
Ditto Troy. People build roads. I guess I need to read the article again. I don't recall any mention of unions.
Read the comments on the article.
I don't see any comments. Maybe a reboot is needed. The page apparently didn't come up correctly.
I was in the Local 478 of Operating Engineers...they had a good bunch of surveyors...
Some analysis of that photo may be in order.
If you look carefully at the relationship between the roadway, the aerial electric tower and the grove of trees on the right shoulder, you will note that the photo of the new roadway is taken several hundred feet further up the road than the photo of the original damage.
Looking at the original, there doesn't seem to be much damage up in the area where the newer photo was taken. The major cracks seem to be right in front of the camera.
Too bad the later photographer didn't turn the camera around......I wonder of this is not a matter of camera placement.
Also, who is to say whether or not this was a "high-priority" project, related to rescue, supply, medical or other situations, lending themselves to an all out effort to get that particular roadway open?
The statement "If the swiftness with which the Japanese can repair roads is any indication, we wouldn't bet against the country cleaning up this catastrophe in short order" shows a fairly unsophisticated outlook regarding the billions of dollars worth of damage officials are talking about. The generalization probably isn't very accurate.
"Given the fact that road crews in the U.S. can spend three or more months repairing a single lane of concrete, only to leave the orange barrels on the road for another two weeks, we're blown away by this feat of engineering."
Excuse me?
Feat of engineering? You would be surprised how fast things could be built if we didnt have to mess with traffic control or quality tests.
But then again, our roads do not buckle like that either.
> http://www.autoblog.com/2011/03/24/japanese-repair-quake-ravaged-road-in-just-six-days/br >
Gotta give some credit on that one, it is amazing what can be accomplished with the red tape disappears.
Good for them, i applaude their excellent effort!
and if we just hired armed gangs to escort the bulldozers,
it would eliminate all those pesky ROW issues that slow highway construction.
> Some analysis of that photo may be in order.
Nice Catch. I was wondering and thinking in the back of my mind if the point of the articel was more of a "Show of face" type propaganda. Something one would typically see out of China, but not out of the realm of probability. There need to be some good news.
Sadly our countries media tends to be the leaders of spin stories.
All that said, I do think they can get things done over there much faster than here but of course with some compromises. Safety, public welfare. Bureaucratic BS Ect.
It is common for the area to be shut down for all traffic and the crews there will work 24/7 until a project is completed.
My sources say this photo is photoshop'd. God forbid we ever give credit to someone who had their ass handed to them by a 8.9 mag earthquake. I mean think of it. 8.9 and they can have this much (or less) work done in 6 days.
Photo looks fine to me...that it was taken at or very near the same spot by the way the street signs are in the same relation to the utility towers further distant. Maybe shot though with a wider lens or different snappy cam in one before.
I don't doubt the speed of repair...it is the Japanese after all.
...and America doesn't own the monopoly on dragging its feet on civil engineering projects ... I'd give that award to Scotland I swear.
> Photo looks fine to me...that it was taken at or very near the same spot by the way the street signs are in the same relation to the utility towers further distant. Maybe shot though with a wider lens or different snappy cam in one before.
>
> I don't doubt the speed of repair...it is the Japanese after all.
>
> ...and America doesn't own the monopoly on dragging its feet on civil engineering projects ... I'd give that award to Scotland I swear.
But would it make sense for the tree colors to have changed in that short a time? It seems like they are photographed in different seasons.
Blaming the slowness of construction projects on the usual "Union" bogeyman is just ignorant, in my opinion. Unions represent the rank and file worker, the troops so to speak. This would be like blaming a battle defeat on the privates rather than the real culprit, the General.
Construction projects go slow for a number of reasons, almost none of them because of the workers who only do what they are told when they are told to do it.
In 1995 a bridge got taken out by a flood on I-5. The State and the Contractor had that bridge back up extremely fast. So we can do it too. The blog post is flawed, at least the last paragraph which has an axe to grind and is not backed up by any supporting evidence.
I seem to remember a year or so ago that a gasoline tanker blew up under a bridge-overpass in the SF Bay area. The fire melted some structural members and the brige-overpass collapsed. It took about two weeks for CalTrans and the contractors to have it back up and running. Pretty sure they were union people too.
DJJ