Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 110: Ponte Morandi

Episode Date: August 5, 2022

why would you use prestressed on a cable stay oh my god SUPPORT EASTERN KENTUCKY RELIEF: https://appalshop.org/news/appalachian-flood-support-resources Sources mentioned: http://www.retrofutur.org/retrofutur/app/main?DOCID=1000116030 https://web.archive.org/web/20180818052325/https://webapi.ingenio-web.it/immagini/file/byname?name=riccardo-morandi-durabilita-ponte-pp.pdf Our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod/ Our Merch: https://www.solidaritysuperstore.com/wtypp Send us stuff! our address: Well There's Your Podcasting Company PO Box 40178 Philadelphia, PA 19106 DO NOT SEND US LETTER BOMBS thanks in advance in the commercial: Local Forecast - Elevator Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/  

You know what? At least when we slap shit together in 30 minutes or less, it doesn't fall down and kill 30 or 43 people. That's true. That's true. I need to make sure I have room for it. I got room for it. OK, we're good. I keep giving you what do you do with the shit I give you? How does this question? I don't know how to computer Liam. I don't know how. I don't know how to install PDF.

You just have a big stack of hard drives. He does. The next time I come over, I'll just install like the biggest one and then I'll give you an SSD. And then what I'll do is I'll slap you around a little bit with the hard drive. So you learn your lesson. Not the plasters. No, be careful. Yeah. No, no, no, no. That's right. I got to do. I got to use one of those shitty cashless SSDs that are basically worse than hard drive.

And they're like, no, no, it's just as good. Like, no, no, it's not. No, the time to failure of one of those is like the time it takes you to slap Justin with it. Minutes. Yeah. I don't know. The Phillies are on. I'm not watching them right now. Hello and welcome to. Oh, all right. Well, there's your problem. It's a podcast about engineering disasters with slides. I'm Justin Rosniak. I'm the person who's talking right now.

My pronouns are he and him. Okay, go. Bonjour. No, I am Alice Cordo Kelly. My pronouns are she and her. I am the person who's talking right now. Yeah, Liam. Yeah, Liam. Yeah. Don't fucking rush me, Ross. You're the guy we were waiting on. Waiting for waiting on. We were waiting on you. This isn't a restaurant.

I'm literally going to punch you in the dick. Did you miss us? Yeah, we missed you real bad. I missed us. Again, thank you to our fans for a moment of sincerity. But why do you people do this to yourself? I mean, even less self-respect than we do. Yeah, it's just I don't know.

I mean, people like, yeah, I'm such a big fan. I'm like, you should probably see some sort of psychiatrist for that. In fairness, I would like to see the psychiatrist who's like $2 a month. My psychologist told me to watch. Oh, Abby. And I was like, yeah. So I've recorded a podcast with Abby and he's like, really? Wow, what's she like? And I was like, oh, she's great.

I was like, why don't you talk about my podcast? I have a podcast two weeks ago. All right, let's talk about a bridge. What is this fucking thing? What is it? Let's go. Lea, did you introduce yourself? I said, yeah, I said, I didn't just complain. I'm the person talking right now again.

Thank you. And my pronouns are he and him. Okay, we're looking at a beautiful Italian town with a very big great bridge over town. I was about to say, but the bridge seems to stop making it more of a pier. Yeah, the bridge over town doesn't go all the way over town. You got to use your imagination. You know that scene from Raiders with the invisible bridge?

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's right. Just keep driving. Just floor up. Yeah, just fuck it. It's fine. This is sort of a New Testament fishing pier. It looks a bit like Darwinia, too. There's a lot of shit going on.

Follow me and you shall become fishers of men. Or you're going to fall off the side and bad shit's going to happen. This is the Ponte Morandi in Genoa as of 2018. There's supposed to be a little bit more of it. Yeah, we're going to talk about why there's not a little bit more of it. But first, we have to do the goddamn news. Goddamn news. Eastern Kentucky flooded pretty bad.

Yeah, our friends in the Trill Billies are not having a great time. I was about to say, yeah. I don't like that it's the time of monsters. Guess what the next slide is. This is this is like unprecedented, right? Like this isn't an area that's supposed to be prone to flooding, right? Those rivers get feisty every once in a while. But this was an exceptional case.

Yeah. You know, this is a national weather service said flooding on the North Fork at the Kentucky River at Whitesburg surged to a new record early Thursday, rising 12 feet in 12 hours. That's too many feet in two hours. That's too like easily comprehensible a number. Like, you know, how occasionally in climate change stuff, you'll you'll hear a number and you're like, okay, that just breaks my brain.

Sea level rise even like it's hard to picture what that looks like a steel ship. Yeah. Yeah. But I can picture there is a foot of water here that there wasn't an hour ago and that happens every hour for 12 consecutive hours. I can picture that too well. I would say the flood stage. The highest flood stage was 16.8 feet.

Fuck no. Yeah, it's pretty bad. Oh, damn, dude. And everything there is built in the River Valley. And you know, it's I mean, when we had the big flood here in Philly, it was almost comedic. This this is built like serious business. Yeah, this is not do not touch your swim in the poop water.

So this is the poop water is now, you know, on top of your town. Yeah, that's the above water of your house. And a lot of a lot of people down there living in like mobile homes and stuff. I was going to say like this is happening to like very vulnerable and deprived places as we've talked about before on at least a couple of episodes. The like the Vulcan Bridge episode. And we did one about like public education in Appalachia. So yeah, I mean, it must be very comforting to do the sort of like

liberal thing and be like, oh, well, I shouldn't have been a public in that. Right, right. And it's like, yeah, that's cute. Like that's coming for you too. Don't worry. Yeah. I know I know I know I want to say Terrence of the Trilobilius said that there's a couple of charities that's on the Apple shop website.

I should have texted them and I didn't. Then I just didn't put something in the description. Something in the description. Yeah. Also, I think I think we can say that we will look into doing something with the Trilobilius, some sort of stream. Oh, for sure. Yeah.

00:06:30,960 --> 00:06:32,800 There's something like that. One relief. Yeah. I don't want to announce plans before they happen. But no, that's something we will look into very strongly. Yeah. Generally, it genuinely sounds like what they need more down there than money is bodies.

And I don't know. All right. You want to go? Yeah. Sure. Why not? Let's try that live.

00:06:51,520 --> 00:06:53,600 Because I have vacation the week of the 15th. No, I'm being deadly serious. It's sounding like, well, there's your problem. Field recording time. Yeah. Roz, yeah, I'll text you out to the show. Well, we can, we can, we can go to Kentucky. We like Kentucky, dude.

We do enjoy going to Kentucky. Yeah, you can, you can save lives and, you know, also come back with a lot of whiskey. Don't hold a shit. We might, we may or may not do it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You remember that Heaven Hill green label, Roz, that you can only fucking get in Kentucky?

And then what happened, Roz? John Craig drank it. No, you, I told you to babysit it and you didn't. You're like, oh, you must have drank it all. And I was like, yeah, that it's funny how that works. Guy. Well, you know, we. Don't blame me for Sean Craig's actions.

That's true. I don't think he listens to the podcast. Yeah. Sean, if you're listening, congratulations on your law school graduation, I guess. Yes. Speaking of now is the time of monsters. Oh, I don't like it even more that it's now the time of monsters again. Yeah.

This is this, but this is at least kind of kind of comical in how bad it is. So this is, this is a little inside baseball for you. So what happened? Was that at a what happened was what happened was at a at an abandoned semi-abandoned according to who you ask, row house in West Philly at 59th and arch authorities discovered like 150 gallons of gasoline in in this row house, like just in drugs, just enough to like hoard individual things for some people. It's hard drives for some people.

It's jugs of gasoline. This is the natural way of the Philadelphia. It was literally gallon. Gallon jugs. Yeah. Yeah. Gallon jugs just filled of gasoline. And the next day, 12 hours later, the house was serious.

After the 150 gallons of gas have been removed, went mysteriously up in flames anyway. That's crazy. And depending on who you believe, this is either like a neighborhood flood, a neighborhood feud. I mean, not a flood neighborhood feud or just like a guy just doing some arson. Classic gas fights. So in case you want to know how the summer heat is affecting us here in Philadelphia, we're trying to move bomb our own neighbors.

We're trying to. When you think about it, it's one of the most efficient ways to get like energy into your house by volume other than keeping uranium in there. And it's a lot less radioactive. So really, this guy is, you know, he's sort of like he's energy maxing. What I don't understand about this is I get hoarding gasoline in an effort to like blow up your own house and take everyone in the neighborhood down with you like that. That part I'm on board.

But what I don't understand is like they sell five gallon jugs. You can play the jugs. The jugs. 150 individual one gallon jugs is not an efficient way to do arson. Well, I mean, maybe it's for like a distribution purposes. You know, you can't start, you know, 50 large fires. You can sell 150 small fires. And that's, you know, again, respect the hustle.

But like, I gotta say, like storing large quantities of flammable chemicals on a residential property is not a good idea. I don't think any responsible person would do that. Ross, he wasn't trying to be responsible. He was mad at his neighbors. That drives even the best of us to interview the guy because he was a named person of interest before the shit caught fire. And he was like, you know, it really hurts my feelings to be accused of this.

I'm like, motherfucker, you're on video. It's you. It's you. How does it hurt your feelings? Like holding a gasoline jug in each hand. Yes. He's leaving the house with the jugs. Like if anyone wearing a big I love arson

T shirt like guy, you gotta you gotta look for cameras, man. It's this is the air of the surveillance state, you know, I'm like 150 gallons of gasoline. If you set that on fire, that's going to be that's not just going to take out one house. That's going to take out at least three or four. Supposedly that's what he was aiming for. Neighborhood disputes are so cool. I think about the time that my my upstairs neighbors smoke alarm was going off every 10 minutes for four days.

And I I too, you know, I'm not sure I could resist the siren call of the gallon gasoline jug. What I'm saying is we need Eagles football back. So this whole city comes down a little bit. I was about to say. You know, what's the back? Yeah, we really need the birds to come back in the interest of public safety. Everyone's getting feisty.

Yeah, settle down. Watch the game. Sending the birds, sending the birds. Malcolm Jenkins would never do this. Well, that was the goddamn news. All right. First, we have to ask ourselves a very deep question. What is Italy?

It's the place I've been most I've most relaxed and most stressed. It's a land of contrast. And that was a contrast in that. Roz, your parents listen to this occasionally. I'm not going to make fun of your dad. I think you can probably like sneak it in. It's fine. Yeah, I was I was I was on vacation in Rome with my parents recently a couple months ago.

Things did not go the one thing that happens when you go on vacation with your parents after not doing a vacation in 10 years is you realize your parents are fucking insane. Yeah. So I just spent last weekend in upstate New York with my parents in Britain. And I love my parents very dearly. I know they listen to this. I got to say, dad, you need to fucking pull it together a little bit. I haven't been on vacation with my parents since I was 12 years old.

And I'm going to keep it that way for the rest of my life. But my dad's a fun traveler. But then he's just like, I'm hot. I know my back hurts. My shoulder hurts. And he's got the best seat in the car. He's all spread out and relaxed like on like on my mom, who is basically fighting for leg room where she shouldn't have to be fighting.

And he's just like, I'm not comfortable. And I'm just like, you'd be a lot less fucking comfortable in the GTI. I'll tell you that right fucking now, man. All right, stop fucking. I mean, that just needs to be like carried in a litter like a sort of like optimum posture. Yes. Yes. Yes.

And he has a goddamn audacity to be like, oh, the GTI is too small. I'm like, motherfucker, there's just two of us. I'm not hauling. I'm not hauling shit around. I'm just hauling like car parts. So how dare you get 30 and gets 30 miles to the gallon and it makes goddamn near 400 horsepower. Now dad, I bet the fucking Cherokee never did that.

Did it? No. You're feeling better for this. You feel better. Yeah, I actually am. I love my dad very much. This is therapeutic. So what we're looking at here is the city of Genoa.

It's got a V in it in Italian, but I'm going to keep calling it Genoa. Genovia. Yeah. Genova. Yeah. Genovia from the Princess Bride. That's right. Princess Bride and Princess Dyers.

Yeah. Princess Dyers. Yeah. Same. Same difference. Sounds like an environmentally efficient diesel engine from Genoa. Genova. Yeah.

Yeah. 00:14:34,640 --> 00:14:35,120 Totally. Yeah. This is Genova. As you can tell from the photo on the left, Genoa is like pretty in a sense, but not like Rome or whatever. Like it's it's quite.

Industrial. It's a big honking port. They used to make a lot of ships there. It's it's Italian Glasgow basically. It's got a waterfront. It's also the origin of the word genes. Ah, is it? Interesting.

It's this. It's it's it's the capital of Liguria. Liguria means nuts. Yeah. Liguria Bulls. It's the city that inflicted Christopher Columbus upon the world. Thanks for that analysis. And it's it's built around this natural harbor that you can see on the map there.

And this river valley, the Polcevara, I think it's pronounced that way. It does not matter. Do not get mad at me in the comments. Otherwise, I will deploy anti-Italian slurs and stereotypes. If you notice. I'm making a pizza. Yeah. I cook at a pizza.

I cook at a pizza. Mafia is not aesthetic. Shut the fuck up. So the people the people of Genoa cook at a pizza in a variety of different places. But the two that I want to talk about here on the bottom of that map. San Piedarena and Corniliano. These names.

These are two like sort of areas of Genoa that are opposite each other on opposite sides of like a river valley. And they're sort of like it's very mountainous terrain outside of this harbor area. Next slide, please. So Genoa was a very important city in terms of building ships. This means that it's also one of the most heavily urban planned cities in Italy, in that it was urban planned for several years by Ariathoroma commands. That joke makes us so happy.

I originally was going to do the US Army Air Force, but it was mostly us. It was mostly us who like bombed did area bombing of Genoa. I mean, you guys did Dresden too. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And, you know, similar sort of like Sigma Arthur Harris bomber mindset going into this, where we just leveled huge amounts of Genoa and like edge for Columbus. Yeah, exactly. And so Genoa was like largely destroyed.

You see some destroyed housing stock here. And this led in the post war years to, you know, we've talked about post war Italian politics before and how everything is like six different conspiracies happening at once. Well, in Genoa, you have a lot of like building speculation, property speculation, the construction industry and the reconstruction industry and the destruction industry of like tearing down old historic districts. And I might be willing to imply that some of this was not entirely above boards. You designated district bombed that was not in fact bombs.

So you can tear it down. Yeah, real sort of crisis hours. So but Genoa, it does rebuild and its population increases. And next slide, please. Someone has the bright idea. What if we bridge that river valley so you can drive from San Piedorena to Corneliano and vice versa? What if we just build a whole system of like Italian motorways and hook that into a system of European motorways?

What if you just called Taylor up? Yeah, sorry about that. I'm just I'm just I'm just laughing because it sounds like something I should laugh at. It's a tic-tac. I implore you not to laugh at it. Don't go on tic-tac. If you have a girlfriend who bugs you all the time to look at tic-tacs, don't. Mm-hmm. Some great cars in this photo, by the way.

Some like vintage Alfa Romeo's, Ramey. There's also some nice. You can see the deck undulating on the bridge. We'll get to that later. It's supposed to do that. She's undulating on my deck. Yeah, it is not supposed to do so. So if you've ever played Euro Truck Simulator 2, if you haven't, you should.

You'll be familiar pretty intimately with the sort of like broader European infrastructural thing that led to the construction of this bridge, the sort of European route. It's on the main European route between France and northern Italy. It's sometimes called the route of flowers or European route 80. This bridge was modeled in that game and then it fell down and they modeled it being fallen down for a bit. That's crap. I like that. No, no, no. Seriously, it was like it was sort of like a user event that you could go and deliver stuff to the reconstruction thing. That's cool.

But so this is part of a broader sort of like automobilization of Europe. Everybody commutes by car. We ship everything by truck. This is done by a state-owned corporation in Italy called Autostrada. They build all of these roads. They maintain all of them. And in order to bridge this very mountainous terrain, in order to bridge this river valley, they hire a guy. Next slide, please. They hire a guy called Ricardo Morandi or, I like this nickname a lot, Le Corbusier on four wheels. Yeah, he's famous for building bridges that are good and stay up.

Yeah, I got the most sort of like unflattering photo of him, I could. I like his, I like he's looking at his little model here, though. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's sort of like a weird Dutch angle. But so he made bridges almost exclusively, particularly these cable-stayed type of bridges. Again, famous for not having any problems. Quote on, quote cable-stayed. Yeah. Well, I mean, here's the thing. His Wikipedia article is the best example of like crisis management.

We were writing this, I cannot emphasize this enough, this morning. Yes. Alice and I were because Roz was asleep and our guest player to be named later. Got COVID. Yeah, got COVID. So we wrote this in 20 minutes, but his Wikipedia article does contain a fantastic sentence. Ricardo Morandi was an Italian civil engineer best known for his innovative use of reinforced concrete and pre-stressed concrete. Although over the years, some of his particular cable-stayed

bridges have had some maintenance trouble. Yes, that is euphemism at its best. So I mean, he likes pretty much exclusively this type of bridge. He builds them in like across different continents. There's one of these in Libya. Quite a few of them. Yeah. It's one of them.

It's one of them in Venezuela. And there's several reasons why you might build a bridge like this. Most notably, in 1950s Italy, steel is very expensive, but you have a lot of the sediment and clay and shit that you need to make concrete. So that's why a lot of it like... The issue with that argument is that to make it... Sorry, what argument? The big issue with the argument that it's cheaper to build with concrete than steel

is that in order to use concrete on this type of bridge, you actually use more steel than if you didn't use the concrete. Don't defeat me with a logic. What I will say is it is something that I have found Italians talking about themselves about how post-war Italian architecture is heavily concrete-based. And it was sort of like a matter of national trustees that other people could like bend concrete. And, you know, it looks very sort of like skinny and elegant. And there's like good sight lines.

Okay, by that logic, Drexel University is the most elegant university in the whole world. The orange brick is good. I like the orange brick. I also like the orange brick. It all looks... That campus was incredible looking in like 1963 or so. Well, we went to school in 2011. Yeah, it looks terrible.

It looks terrible now. They fucked that shit up real bad. You remember the greed wall that just died instantaneously? That was the funniest shit. They had to replant that thing every year. Yeah, they never got it working, to my knowledge. It's time for fake plastic plants, I think, at that point. But as well.

We got to talk about like how these buildings are built, how these bridges are built, which means we got to talk about pre-stressed concrete, which means next slide. I was just going to say down here is I've been over one of his bridges. It's this one. This is the Viedada Anza de Tevere, right? This is on the road from Fumicino Airport to Central Rome. It's one of the highways there. It goes over nothing.

I think it goes over the remnants of a landslide when I was on the van, because my parents, instead of us taking a nice fast train to the apartment, we got a van, you know, a taxi. And when I saw this coming up, I was like, oh, shit, it's a Miranda bridge. All right. Well, that's my good dog. That's my good dog, y'all. Yeah, that's what I knew.

I was taking my life into my own hands on this vacation if I allowed my parents to determine what we were doing. That's less than never going vacation. Yes, exactly. I'm sad enough. I stand back from the next many slides, because this is all the engineering stuff that I'm not qualified for. I saw someone else writing this, and I was like, I woke up and I looked at it,

and I was like, all right, all right, I got to take over here. Cracks, knuckles. We wrote this in 20 minutes, man. You were asleep. We're going to assume some control here. No, you talk about it. Yo, no, I'm Justin Roziak. I'm the person who's talking right now.

Pre-stressed concrete is good, because it makes it more rigid. It's cheaper. It's cheaper. It is cheaper, possibly. I'm still stinging from being owned in the previous slide. I do want to point out that at Charlotte Motor Speedway, May 20, 2000, it turns out the company that had built the concrete pedestrian bridge had illegally added a chemical to make it cure faster,

and the whole thing fell 17 feet and injured like 107 people. So what I'm saying is don't do pre-stressed concrete. Build everything out of, you know, don't build anything. Yeah, you know, just don't. All right, Roz, go. Okay, so here's the thing about concrete, right? Very good if you squeeze it, if it's in compression. You try and pull apart it, it breaks instantly,

because it's just a bunch of rocks with like a binder, right? Yeah. So what if you wanted to have concrete work in tension as well as compression? Don't do that, idiot. Yeah, don't do it. Number one, we have a couple of options, though, if you really want to do it. One of which is reinforce concrete, you put some steel reinforcing bar in there, you cast the concrete around it, boom, you got a sort of this matrix of materials there

that performs pretty okay in both tension and compression, right? Another option, if you want to go, if you have like some kind of specific application, which requires like a really long concrete span or a wide one or something like that, you can do this fun thing called pre-stressing, right? And the idea of pre-stressing is you take a couple big steel rods or wires, right? And you stress them out, right? And then you tell them they have to write a podcast in 20 minutes. Artificial deadlines, that's what that is.

You've got to say, yeah, you put them under a whole bunch of tension. Yeah, we were, man. Again, wrote in 20 minutes. Then you pour concrete around them. At least you didn't do that. And then you release the tension when the concrete is cured, right? That is classical pre-stressing, but pre-stress concrete actually, at this point, like pre-stress involves, there's several ways you can do it other than this.

You can do post-tensioning. You can do like modern post-tensioning lets you adjust the tension over time or replace the cables if you need to. But classic pre-stress concrete, this is the method, right? And this is useful for a lot of things like floors, girders. You could do a whole bunch of stuff with it. But our friend Mirandi had an idea, which is, what if we tried to use it for a cable-stayed bridge, right?

Make the stays themselves out of... What we'll do is we'll break the concrete. Yeah, yeah. All right, let's talk about the bridge. So here's the bridge, right? All right, you can see it goes over the rivers down here. There's a railroad yard here. There's an exit that joins the bridge over here.

There's this highway exit. Yeah, and instead of being a bridge that goes over nothing, it's a bridge that kind of goes over everything. It's this weird situation where it's like, normally it's supposed to be a bypass. And it does bypass, I guess, but it's like... Physically, it's in the place that it's bypassing. It looks like it has an apartment building underneath it.

Yeah, it does. But actually, multiple apartment buildings. Multiple apartment buildings. Oh, God, it's just like Boston. All those weird buildings right over the mass pipe coming into Boston. Don't like those. Yeah. They were scary.

You know what else it has under it or next to it? There's a steel mill next to it. We're going to get there. So yeah, the current location of the bridge up here is sort of the harbor we showed before is over here. You go on a highway, you go through a bunch of tunnels, you go over the bridge, you go on a highway. You go up a bunch of funky curves.

It's cool. Italian infrastructure things where there's like a million tunnels and a million bridges and they built it for 20 lira. The other thing about this, by the way, is that because it's in a river valley pretty close to the sea, it just gets a lot of very salt wind just whipping directly down that valley. This will also be important later. So this is Barondi's model of one of the pillars, right?

This is where we should look at the, it looks cool. It's a good looking bridge. I will say that. It looks really cool. So what are the forces acting on a cable state bridge? We've literally done this multiple times and I still don't remember. You're going to take away the college credits I got for doing this earlier. There's one force acting on it, which is gravity,

including the weight of the vehicles, right? So your gravity is a downward vector, right? You know, that points directly to the center of the earth where hell is. Because we all want to go there, right? And speak for yourself. I'm building a big sort of block staircase up in order to, in order to counteract that in order to support this bridge deck, you have a big pillar, right?

Providing your upward force, but this is distributed in a diagonal fashion by way of these cable stays, which means there's now a horizontal component as well. So these bridge decks have to be able to counteract that force. So the deck is in compression horizontally from the cable stay. So these have to be pretty rigid. This is opposed to like a suspension bridge where. Alice is like, yeah, that's right. As opposed to a suspension bridge where everything's hung vertically

and there's not as much, you know, structure required on the bridge deck there. This is, this is more of a involved operation, but theoretically uses less material. But on these cables, on these cable stays, this is all tension. Yeah, like just wants to pull apart in both directions. Yes, right. You know, it's all tension, all of its tension. And that means concrete is only going to give you grief. Sure.

This is not going to help you in any way. Because what you've done is you want to use steel for this, I guess. Yeah, you use steel cables. Okay. Yeah. But what you've done is you've used concrete, which is bad. And then an attempt to rectify that you've added steel that you would otherwise have used to just do it. Actually more steel than you need.

So here's, I stole this image from blogpost.retrofuture.org, because we were working fast. Apologies for stealing all the information off that blog. Every slide, every image you have ever seen in this podcast has been stolen. Yeah, that's true. We take a sort of libertarian approach to intellectual property here. Yeah. So here's an interesting thing about how our boy Morandi designed these cable stays.

And actually, I have to erase a bunch of these lines now. How do I do that? Just go over them in white with the jump. Oh, okay. There you go. Okay. So what do you might notice here? What you might notice here, and this is one of the worst details I've seen in my life.

At the base of the cable, at the bottom of the cable, where it meets the deck, you can see here, there are two concrete sections. And at some point up here or somewhere, they merge into one concrete section. Yeah, because it gives the impression of speed and elegance. Yes. Yeah. So here are the two cross sections of those girders, I guess you would call them. Stays, whatever.

At the top of the stay, it's this section, right? And at the bottom of the section, it's these two stays, right? Yeah. Gotcha. Yeah, yeah. And so we have the A cables and the B cables here, not my terminology. This is from the blog, but it's a good way to distinguish them. The A cables are in the middle, right?

And the B cables are on the outside. And of course, they split up as they go further down, right? These A cables were installed and tightened first before casting the concrete. The bridge was actually fully self-supporting with only those cables. We'll see that in the next slide. But since they were installed, they were under tension. They couldn't pre-stress them or post-tension them or something, right? I have a question and one that sort of answers itself, which is,

if it holds itself up like that, why not just leave them like that and don't put all this shit over them? And my sort of proposed answer to this is that Mirandi also made another bridge like this, but he did leave them unclad in Venezuela and those corroded instantly. Oh, super fast, yeah. We'll get to that. Mirandi's theory was that if they were encased in concrete, they would corrode more slowly. Or they wouldn't corrode at all, which turned out not to be the case.

So once these A cables were installed, the bridge was self-supporting. They installed the B cables. These are the ones on the outside. We'll see that in the next slide. And these were tensioned in such a way that during the maximum load condition of the bridge, right, it's fully loaded. There's a bunch of trucks on it. There's snow, whatever.

Yeah, there's an obese man riding a very small bicycle, all of this. Several obese men riding several small bicycles. Richard Scarry's busy tab, yes. Yeah, exactly. There's a worm driving an apple. Very heavy apple. These B cables would keep the concrete effectively, structurally neutral, right? It would be at zero compression, zero tension, right?

It's just a box over the thing. Yes, because the concrete girder around it, of course, is a liability at this point. Oh, sure. And then when the bridge is unloaded, like there's light traffic that day, then the tension on the B cables keeps the entire girder sort of in moderate light compression, right? There's some problems with this design, right, right off the bat. Number one is like, why are you using the concrete in the first place?

And his theory is, as I said, he's going to reduce corrosion. The other problem is the cross section of the concrete here is very small, right? That means you can't put a lot of tension on the pre-stressing cables, right? If you put a lot of tension on there, it would tend to buckle the concrete, right? And that would cause cracks and that would lead to water infiltration and that would cause corrosion, right? All sorts of problems, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So, Miranda basically has to keep the tensioning on these cables at sort of the bleeding edge of structural stability in order for this design to work. Why does he think that this is a good idea? Surely, this is the kind of thing that you have to calculate and be like, oh, this makes me uncomfortable. It's going to resist corrosion. Yeah, awesome. Yeah, he's got a resist corrosion.

He's got a more trapped mind here. Because it's by the sea and besides, that other bridge in Venezuela had very nearly fallen down and they had to replace all of the fucking steel. So, what if you've made it impossible to replace the steel? I don't know if you can get mad at me. Yeah. So, you can see these are pictures of the bridge under construction. Right here, you can see these are the A cables, right?

And there's a safety structure underneath. And this other image, the cables are color-coded. Again, I stole this from Retrofuture. Thanks, guys. Thank you. Yeah, so it's a transformative work because we're making dick jokes over it. This is true.

This is true. So, you can see the A cables are tensioned here. This is as they're casting the concrete. The B cables, these are just limp at the moment. They're going to tension those after they finish casting the concrete, right? So, you can see here's the completed bridge. It's very thin and dainty. It looks very nice, just elegant Italian-type design.

And elegant Italian-type design has never had problems. No, that's right. That's why... That's true and correct. They're sort of famously hard-wearing Alfa Romeo things of this nature. Yeah, exactly. It's like they always say, you know, you can fix Italian shit, you can fix it with a shovel.

Who knew you could... Who knew carbon fiber could rust? All the Italians. It's got like two parts. They're both interchangeable. It works without either of them. There is, actually, there is one piece of Italian machinery that's true of. It's just, it's a coffee pot.

Like the mocha pot? Yeah, a mocha pot is the Italian AK-47 that will work without sort of any moving parts. They're really bad on an electric stove. I've found it. That's true, but get a real stove. I'll ask my landlord about it. So it starts to have problems almost immediately, right? Oh, sure.

You go dust off your sleeves and then you look at the bridge, which has collapsed into a big pile of rust. You think to yourself, job well done. All right, there's a song by Radiohead called Creep. Oh, my God, I hate that fucking song. And it's about concrete, right? No, it's about donuts. I'm not listening to all of this.

I have left work. I am going home to my impossibly beautiful wife. She looks like she's from a Paolo Sorrentino movie. She is cooking me the pizza. And I'm, you know, I'm just having pizza. Exactly. And I'm having a Dolce Vita. I'm, I'm riding around on a little moped.

I'm not paying attention to any of this shit. So I'm conducting a series of like stay-behind career operations to maintain a strategy of tension. Over time, concrete tends to change its shape under any kind of load, right? This is called creep. Creep happens in many materials, but it thinks like, like steel or other metals. It tends to happen only under high loads, as opposed to under any kind of load, right? So this bridge was under an exceptionally weird set of forces, right?

No, you don't want to do that. You know, these cables bore the weight of the bridge, but they were under additional tension to keep the concrete in place. Had cyclical loading, right? The cross-section of the cable stairs is very dainty that the bridge started to experience large amounts of creep, mostly from the concrete, very quickly, right? And that meant that among other things, they'd never successfully leveled the road deck. Turning on my sort of like all terrain to go over this bridge.

That meant when it rained, a whole bunch of water would just form giant puddles on the bridge. Oh, it's a swimming pool. There is there is another detail about this, which as you will occasionally see, this is sort of the tabloid angle is to what extent this being Italy was organized crime involved. In fact, sometimes they'll even say the mafia, although in general we're talking about the Drangheta rather than the mafia. But they're like this sort of like popular conception of this is Italy is a mobbed up country. Therefore, particularly in the construction industry, the mob gave them

bad concrete and the bridge fall down. That's not true. Like in terms of supplying good quality concrete, something like Italy is quite good at even in the depths of the years of lead, what was heavily like crime infiltrated was like construction repair and maintenance and stuff. So one lingering question is the guys who you get to repair the bridge and try and level the bridge. Maybe those guys aren't necessarily the guys who should be doing it. I'm I'm going to say this, if you got the best quality concrete money could buy, if you got the 10,000 PSI stuff that they only manufacture for like university earthquake testing rigs, if you got the world's greatest concrete, that would make this bridge exceptionally harder to build.

Because you would have you would have to pre stress it that much more. Maybe they should have had mobbed concrete, you know. Yeah. It's the concrete superligaria. Beetles. So another issue here was corrosion, right? A big problem with reinforced concrete in general, including pre stress, post tension, etc, etc. There's metal in it that metal corrodes over time. This is also a problem with all steel structures. But the thing is with an all steel structure, you can see the corrosion. And then once you see it, you can fix it theoretically.

Some places aren't very good with that, you know, Pittsburgh, for instance. Well, you can see it happening. You just have to also care that it's happening. Yes, there's lots of sources of corrosion. You got water infiltration, you might have chemical reactions between the concrete and the steel. A fun one is like electrochemical stuff. I don't know if I've relayed this anecdote on the pod before. Hi, it's Justin. So this is a commercial for the podcast that you're already listening to. People are annoyed by these, so let me get to the point. We have this thing called Patreon, right? The deal is you give us two bucks a month,

and we give you an extra episode once a month. Sometimes it's a little inconsistent, but, you know, it's two bucks to get what you pay for. It also gets you our full back catalog of bonus episodes so you can learn about exciting topics like guns, pickup trucks, or pickup trucks with guns on them. The money we raise through Patreon goes to making sure that the only ad you hear on this podcast is this one. Anyway, that's something to consider if you have two bucks to spare each month. Join at Patreon.com forward slash WTYP pod. Do it if you want, or don't. It's your decision, and we respect that. Back to the show. I used to work with a guy who we call Kaz, which is fun because I was Roz and he was Kaz.

He did structural restoration for a long time, did a lot of reinforced concrete stuff. He worked on the water maker building here in Philly down in the 80s, right? Or back in the 80s. He was in the basement. The thing about the water maker building is they opened up one of the walls to check on the rebar, how the rebar was doing, and they opened it up and the rebar was not there. Oh, good. Yeah, none of it was there. None. All of it had disappeared. This is a big like 1920s sort of department store building, right? Has the world's largest operational pipe organ? So there were two questions to be asked there, which was one, why is it gone? And two, how do we fix it?

Liam, I can't believe you missed has the world's largest operational pipe organ. No, it doesn't actually. That's false. The world's largest operational pipe organ is in my pants. They're eventually. So I'm coming to go on Alice, much like Nelson Rockefeller. It turned out what happened was on one side of the water maker building was the trolley tunnel. On the other side of the water maker building was the Market Frankfurt L. And they operated very slightly different voltages. And over the course of like 70 years, the current ran from the trolley to the L

through the rebar and the water maker building and sort of electrolyzed it away. What the fuck? That's so cool. Use I'm using the world's largest operational pipe organ's whole building as an electrolyte, rather. And and this is this is some of the wacky stuff that can happen. That's fucking cool as hell. So what I'm learning here is that steel just wants to corrode. And if it does, it will just decide to do it. Yeah, it's pretty much unable to look at it and tell it to cut that out. Yeah, it's sneaky, which is something you can do in a steel building.

So a lot of the stuff you could mitigate. One of the one thing that's pretty popular is you jacket the rebar with some kind of material, right? You jack off the rebar. You put you put some kind of plastic on top of it, right? And that reduces con contact. Is there any problem you can't solve? This reduces contact with the concrete, right? And theoretically prevents corrosion. The big problem with putting it in plastic, though, is that there's any small hole in the plastic where anything can come in contact with the steel. All of a sudden, it corrodes like hell right from that spot at like a hugely accelerated rate.

Everything leaks. Yes. So yeah, this this bridge had problems with corrosion. Another problem is next to a steel mill and the sea. Yes, but you can't look at the steel. You don't know that it's broken. That's true. Another problem with especially pre stress structures. Post tensioning has mitigated this to some extent is something called relaxation, right? So over time, your your tensioned cables inside the concrete, they've relaxed. They stopped getting so stressed out, you know, they they just sit down on the couch, you know, they watch a watch a couple seasons, the Sopranos in a day, you know, and this once

they're not once they're no longer under tension, suddenly the the properties of the concrete have changed pretty dramatically in that they're not able to handle tension at all, right? But a lot of modern structures are allowed are built to allow for you. You can re tension the steel every couple years if you need to more than every couple years, every couple decades, maybe, right? Or you can replace it. Miranda's design did not allow for this ideal. Bridges never need maintenance. I love it. I love the idea of a disposable bridge. I should point out this this bridge did have a specified lifespan, which was 50 years. Yes, it came down to 51. That's right. So it did what it did on the did what it said on the tip.

What's the problem? Performance is advertised. That's right. Leave at 5 p.m. on the dots. So yeah, Miranda's design meant that when the steel was in the concrete, it was in the concrete. You never saw that again, right? And that's another another issue with it is something you might call inspectability. It's a word I just made up. There might be a real word for this. It was very difficult to find out if something was going wrong with the bridge, right? All the cables are embedded in concrete. All the structures concealed. If a cable broke or there was corrosion, you couldn't detect it, right? And in 1979, Miranda himself noted, well, there's a whole bunch of deficiencies in the bridge that we can remedy, right?

He wanted to add a last murder to the cables. He wanted some reinforcements, but he defended the fundamental design as sound, right? He says, we must think about what would have been the maintenance costs if instead of a structure made entirely of concrete, a steel solution had been adopted, or at least if the solution of the state cables embedded in a concrete shell under compression and therefore not subject to cracking had not been adopted. He's not very good at writing. I can barely figure out what he's saying here. It sounds better and it sounds more poetic in the original Italian. The translation might not be that good. Furthermore, in these last years, the external surfaces of the structures and especially those exposed

towards the sea and therefore more directly attached by the acid fumes of the chimneys start showing an aggression phenomena of chemical origin. That is a cool phrase, an aggression phenomenon of a chemical origin. Yes, this is obviously due to the production of soluble salts resulting from the combination of acids of the fumes with the free lime of the concrete, the well-known loss of superficial chemical resistance of the concrete itself. I think he's talking about efflorescence there, which is usually harmless but doesn't look good. I think is with the CK that sooner or later may be, maybe is two words, in a few years it will be necessary to resort to a treatment

consisting of the removal of all traces of rust on the exposure of the reinforcements to fill the patches with an epoxidic type resins and finally to cover everything with elastomers of very high chemical resistance. He thinks the design is sound because he thinks this is resisting corrosion far better than what bare steel would, right? The issue is it didn't. Of the parts of the bridge they were able to monitor it was fairly clear by like the 90s they got to do some fixes, right? So this is Pylon 11. This is a picture from, again, Retrofuture where I stole a good chunk of this from. This is a picture from Google Maps. This is the easternmost cable stay.

We did this in 20 minutes. Yeah. This is the easternmost cable stay. It's the one with the exit that comes in, right? Or I guess an entrance ramp. And this saw some of the most advanced decay of any part of the bridge, any part that was monitored, right? And they required a major structural refit which it received in 1993. What they did here is they took and they put exterior steel cables on the concrete cable stays, right? That is an elegant solution. No, it isn't. Shut up. I'm just taking L off to L here, on site. You're very pretty, at least. Thank you. So here's the problem. What is the problem, man? The whole thing is a problem.

If you simply added more cables, what would happen is you would overstress the concrete girder and it would buckle, right? Oh, that's bad. So as they were adding these new cables, they had to go in with big concrete circular saws, cut the window into the girder, and then cut the old cable each time they put a new one in. Oh, they're the jobs of life, that bitch. I love it. I'm just thinking about the sort of medical surgical equivalent of this, which is to like your arm is fucked up, right? We're not going to amputate it. What we are going to do is build like a prosthetic arm that attaches just above it. Yes. The net result of this is that this bridge becomes the most monitored bridge in Europe,

because it's so difficult to maintain. It's very temperamental, right? But it also becomes a weird source of pride, right? They teach about the bridge in Italian engineering schools. They show students how this is how we monitor structures. This is how we fix structures that are broken, even if they're fundamentally broken. You know, we keep the thing, we kept the thing standing. We're doing great. And it looks pretty cool, right? This was what I was operating off of. Yeah. So anyway, nothing happened. You know, what happened was, what happened was the future. And specifically, the 1990s, you remember Autostrada, the like sort of public, the state-run corporation that builds all of the

most ways and maintains them. Well, as we progress into modernity, as people drive more, there are more cars, there are heavier trucks, the worm is driving an apple, all of this. In 1999, Italy wants to join the European Union. Because the European Union is largely fiscally administered by psychotic Germans, there are very strict fiscal requirements to join the European Union. Fiscal requirements that require you to grossly oversimplify a lot of sort of ability to have cash on hand, which the Italian state does not. And so one of the ways, and in fact, the sort of like fiscal accession stuff is designed to encourage this, one of the ways to raise that sort of capital is to privatize. And in 1999, Autostrada is privatized. And it was

bought by the Benetton family, the clothes people. Yeah, those assholes. Do not let a weird family own all of your shit. Like, I haven't, I've barely even heard of Benetton, but they're, United Colors of Benetton. Yeah, they're terrible clothes. Between them, between like four people, they have like several billion euros worth of wealth. And through a holding company that owns a holding company, they owned 30% of Autostrada, which is then renamed to Atlantia. And this operated like two thirds of Italy's motorways. It repaired them, it inspected them. Incidentally, they also own like 60% of the fucking roadside restaurants and the company that inspects all of the highway inspections.

I want to say most of those restaurants are not roadside there, in fact, suspended over the Autostrada, which looks really cool. Shit, that's cool. Yeah. But in a very literal sense, vertical integration, right? So Benetton, the Benetons are making like money hand over fist over this. They basically own a huge amount of the sort of like strategic Italian road infrastructure. And it's 1999, everything's going to be perfect forever. Next slide, please. 2008. What happened then, Alice? Well, do you recall the subprime mortgage crisis when a bunch of American banks, well, international banks really were like packaging up mortgages that they had issued that they knew were likely to be defaulted on

into collateralized debt obligations, CEOs. Oh yeah, it's good when they do that. And then traded those collateralized debt obligations, hoping that the mortgages would never actually fail. And then the mortgages did fail, and it took out Goldman Sachs, no, Best Earns. Goldman Sachs like ate shit off of this. It destroyed a huge amount of money instantly. And it really hit Italy quite badly. Next slide, please. I mean, this is sort of a historical argument you can make, right? You can say Italy was growing and then the 2008 financial crisis fucked it, or you can take the longer view, which I like to do, and you can say Italy was sort of demonstrating sort of a

false growth by privatizing stuff. And essentially, in like real terms, has been this like long decline since the 80s. And Italy, like, we know what Italy's like, right? It's like the stereotypes. It's bureaucracy and torpor and corruption and organized crime. Ferraris. Ferraris. And 15 governments in a month and little industrial cartels. Very nice high speed trains. Yes. Yes. The stuff that's good is really good. The stuff that's bad is really bad. Exotic cars made by hand in which the doors, not if they'll fall off, when they'll fall off. Yeah. Yeah. If you if you buy what is basically a salvage title fucking Kuntas, that's on you. Yes. Yes. Do doing 16 different conspiracy theories at the same time.

All of which are actually happening. Yes. Yes. And so Italy, Italy's economy never really kicks the can far enough down the road to become post industrial in a way that even the UK did. And we're seeing that like, you know, we're reaping that now. But Italy never even really got that far. And so there was this sort of huge increase in amongst other things cost of living as beautifully illustrated by Liam's pizza inflation diagram. How many tomatoes do you get in a case of tomatoes? I don't know. 24. I would think it would be by weight. 24 tomatoes, exactly.

No, by weight. Alice is right. You can get 25 pounds of tomatoes from Costco. Finally, I've been right about something. So a beautiful statistic that again, that Liam found is that in 2006, Italy spent 14 billion euros on its roads. In 2010, Italy spent 4 billion euros on its roads. This took a 10 billion euro haircut. I will say that Italy and Spain are both extremely good at keeping costs down on infrastructure investment. They have some of the lowest costs per unit of infrastructure of anywhere in the world. I mean, they had to get a lot better after this because they just ripped out like 70% of the budget. And so a lot of Italy's infrastructure just sort of

collapses metaphorically. And a lot of Italy's infrastructure just sort of collapses. Next slide, please, literally. I really like this picture. This is like a little road bridge that has just perfectly taken out one tiny cop car. To me, this is perfect Italian vibes. This would probably be another post-tension structure. This is a concrete box girder. Yeah. Just thunk. I mean, everyone who was, everyone was saying that the fucking Miranda Bridge is going to collapse. This is a Europe-wide problem of infrastructure. It's true in Spain as well, France, even Germany. Italy is particularly bad. And you get a lot of mysterious acts of God's love between 2013 and 2018. Ten bridges collapse in Italy.

It's pretty minor in this sense, which is like, you know, it squishes a cop car, which doesn't have anyone in it. Yeah, exactly. It squishes an empty cop car. But like, it's unsettling for your concrete bridges to just be doing this like more or less routinely. And so the political system of Italy springs into action. Next slide, please. Such that it is. Yeah, we got to do something about this, right? Out of Strada and the sort of like the Italian government have this plan, which is to replace the bridge, to replace the Ponte Miranda with a ground route, the Grande Di Ponente, which is like a bypass of a bypass. We're going to totally reinfaculate the whole

Genoese highway system. It's going to go to like a new like new interchange system, which is going to have a restaurant above it. And that's going to be cool. Go around to the north. Thing is right. I kind of see this a bit as like the boy crying wolf a bit in the the Italian political system is very, very slow, very corrupt often, particularly the sort of like the establishment Italian politics, like, you know, Christian democracy. And so this this plan is wildly unpopular. And there are good reasons for it to be unpopular. We've talked about like induced demand before. We've talked about like, why are you still building

highways? Yes. Perfectly reasonable questions to ask. And this guy, who Italian name alert, Beppe Grio. That's not real. I'm Beppe. This guy, this guy's this guy's a comedian originally, who's a standout comedian. And he became head of what was initially a joke political party, the five star movement, which has since become sort of the dominant force in Italian politics has become incredible, twisted in various different ways, become like very like dubious. But like, I would describe the five star movement as like, basically the only like true populists in the sense of the vibe is fuck the establishment often for a good reasons. Therefore, just whatever that guy

particularly feels like doing on a particular day. And so in this instance, they were one of the big drivers behind this dissatisfaction with Italian politics in the form of building this big bypass. There's this thing here on on the 8th of April, 2013, the five star movement published an article on their blog about the fable of the imminent collapse of the Ponte Mirandi, which was then very quickly deleted. Next slide. Yeah, that's I mean, it's not like the collapse was inevitable, though. No, no, I just had to do something about it. Well, I don't think they supported that either. On the god damn it, let me fucking scroll here. On the 14th of August, 2018, it's like late morning, 1130 in the morning. It's this massive rainstorm.

Thankfully, the bridge is pretty empty. There's like a festival that's like keeping traffic off of the streets. And what happens is the bridge falls down. Yes. Yeah, the big, the big red bit, that's just not there anymore. Like two of these stays, well, either one of them collapses or both of them collapse. And it takes the rest down with it under, under exceptional loading, one of the cable stays collapses. Once that happens, all four of them are going to collapse because this is a balance structure between essentially the way this works is you have the cable stay, or this part acts as one unit, then you have the sort of cantilevered section between each unit of cable stay. That's the pattern. You can see the reinforced one back here.

So once one of these stays goes, that whole section comes down. And there was actually surveillance video which caught this collapse. Oh, yeah, there's a few videos of this, which I listen, we've tried to embed video in this YouTube video before. No, it is yourselves. Yes. This particular section had been exhibiting a lot of signs of not doing well for a couple weeks before the collapse. There were a bunch of big cracks in the roadway is a little more unsettled than it normally was. It was, it was a problem which was eminently detectable. But you would have had to have closed the bridge while you do further investigation. There were also, there was also a situation where they were dumping a,

they were doing some works on it, so they dumped a bunch of jersey barriers on there, so there was more load than usual. Great. So yeah, the tower collapses, the roadway collapses, it dumps a bunch of cars and trucks either into the dry riverbed, onto an apartment building, onto railroad tracks. Just in general, it just rains cars and bridge deck. You can see this on the bottom right, this one truck that like stopped just in time. Kind of a symbol of the whole thing. The guy literally, you know, said I basically, I stopped as soon as I could and I just turned around and ran. Yeah, I think there was one van that was like stuck on the edge for several hours with a guy inside, which is AD don't want to be

in that situation, I would say. That's not a good situation to be in. That's sort of like a Looney Tunes type situation. Yeah. It's very funny in a cartoon and then it happens in real life. I'm like, ah, this kind of sucks, huh? Yeah. Like falling off a cliff or getting hit by a wrecking ball. Getting an anvil dropped on you. Getting an anvil dropped on you in real life. Not very good. Workman's car. Workman's car. Next slide, please. So I mean, this, this kills 43 people, injures another 16. It makes 600 people homeless instantly because your house has just had a bridge dropped on it. And the firefighters are out trying to dig people out of the wreckage all night. What is what is interesting is that the Benetons, the Beneton

family take two days to issue a statement to be like, oh, that sucks. Sorry about that. What is the point of having PR flax, whose literal job this is, if they're not going to put one out right away? That's your whole job. It's just to catch shit. Because you've been, you're suffering from success. You've been like drinking little coffees standing at the bar. Much like DJ Khaled. Yeah. You've been doing like House of Gucci shit. And therefore, you know, it's fine. Don't worry about it. I mean, what do you even say in the press release? I mean, sorry, bridge collapse a hard ban. Yo, listen, we're going to give them all coupons for a sale at JCPenney. Would you like to buy the ugliest sweatshirt ever made at a slightly reduced rate?

That's a male rebate. That's not a coupon. Let's be very clear about that. So I mean, most of them are going to use them. So this is this is a huge sort of psychic wound in Genoa and like in Italy, more generally, you know, I don't think we talked about the sort of cultural impact that this bridge had. But it was kind of like it's like the Brooklyn Bridge brackets Italian. And like overnight, it's just gone. There's actually an architectural petition to try and save it. But it very rapidly becomes apparent that it has to be demolished. I'll be once it once it fell down, that would have been difficult to put back up. Yeah. I'm not sure maybe they want to just like fill the gap to

something I'm very familiar with. Yeah, yeah. But so this also becomes a sort of a political controversy in that people feel that it's something that the Italian establishment in the form of like the Benetons and Democratic Christiania and like, you know, the establishment, the deep state whatever have like stitched this up, right? Like 17 families boycott of the memorial service. There's this quote from from one who went, he said, the central government will scapegoat the bridge company, the company will scapegoat someone else. They're all to blame. And we all know how bad our infrastructure is. So there are like, we're only just beginning to feel the sort of like political effects of this because the trial, because they put 50 something people on trial for like corporate

manslaughter for this thing about Italian justice, you may be familiar with is very fast, very efficient. And so the trial started this month. But, you know, I read about it and people, you know, people testifying like this isn't just about the bridge. This is like a whole political order that delivered the fucked up bridge that is on trial. And the hope is to like obtain a better Italy from it. I, you know, your guess is as good as mine is to how successful that's going to be. The good news, I guess, is that they do force that like the courts force the Benetons out of the motorway business. Nice. But just in like an eminent domain way, they get paid for it. Like they are forced to essentially sell their steak and

and out of strata to the Italian state are harsh. They put it in Trinitalia right afterwards. Yeah. Out of strata pays like 3.4 billion euros compensation, which does get you a lot of Xbox is divided up amongst 43 people. And then you got a figure there also paying the 600 people made homeless. And then most of all, the landlord of the building that got busted. Yeah, that's true. He probably got he probably got two and a half billion of that. The greatest victim of all. Yes. The lawyer. Yes, of course. That's right. And the lawyer of the landlord of the building. And the ugly clothes family is still doing very well for themselves. Their collective was still about like 2.9 billion euros. Congratulations, fuck holes. Yeah, it's between

four people. So it's not I'm doing the podcast logic here. It's between four people. I'm going to go into a universe. You know, the colors are better than a piss off the sweatshirts. How would you tell a difference? Next slide, please. Well, they do wet. Yeah. Yeah. Well, so they built a new one. They got because, you know, they got Renzo Piano to do it because he's from Genoa. I am surprised that Renzo Piano designed such a plain looking bridge here. Once again, I'm going to be honest. It is not it is not not a not architecturally interesting in a way. No, I put in the I put in the notes here that it looks like a left page up pressed too many times and skit in city skylines as bridge skitties, sirens, skitties,

I like. There might be more interesting bits of it, but this is the photo that I have supposed to evoke boats because Genoa supposed to be like sales and a boat deck and shit. Sure it is. One funny detail I noticed for this, the bridge will be constantly monitored by four robots designed by the Italian Institute of Technology. Because that's what you trust, right? Is a robot designed by the Italians? At some point, the doors are going to come off equipped with wheels. They're going to they're going to trundle along the external rails of the bridge with their little articulated arms and they're going to or they're going to automate the inspection of the underside of the bridge deck. Seems like a mistake. I just want to

say this. If we learned one thing from the design of the previous bridge is that the problems on the bridge are on the inside, not the outside. Well, I mean, consider this progress because it's hard as a bribe robot. Thank you for shouting that in my ear. Yeah, the Italian Institute of Technology has. I would never shout in your ear. Never. The Italian Institute of Technology announces the development of the first corrupt robot. There's no. Why do you need a robot to inspect the bridge? You can have a guy. The way you inspect this bridge from the underside is that once every two or three years you have a guy walk along the street and like with a pair of binoculars and you just look

where you would have to pay that guy. And this is true. Instead of that guy, you could have a robot who does it all the time, doesn't complain, isn't in a union and polishes the solar panels on the side of this thing as a bonus or solar panels on the side. So I'm told. Oh my God. So generate like like half a kilowatt. Like on a nice day, you could run a laptop off of it. Yeah. What do you think's powering the RGB? It's cool. It's a gamer bridge. I believe that'd be G Y W R. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Well, the important thing is that, you know, because it's a Renzo Piano,

this new bridge is going to be fine. And we've we've all looked, we've all learned a lot. And, you know, everything's going to be fine. So long as the economy doesn't next slide, please. Oh, no, not again. Oh, no. Probably fine. You know, I feel like we're getting these not stonk slides closer and closer together every few years. It's funny how that works. Yeah. What are you going to do? Building a new bridge when this one falls down. Exactly. Put 50 out of strata executives on trial for corporate man's laws. Well, I will say a lot of the problems with pre-stressing are easier to solve with post-tensioning

because one of the things about the previous bridges, of course, once those cables were in there, they were in there. Now, with post-tensioning, those cables are threaded. It's a big threaded rod, right? And that means that when when they start to relax too much, what do you do instead of having to replace them is you get a guy with a big wrench and you tighten them back up. Every couple years. Well, more than every couple years, every couple, like a decade or so, right? It's much easier now because you just need a guy with a wrench. It really does seem that this is like one of the plainest like architect caused disasters we've done in a minute.

Well, I don't think the idea of maintaining the building was as prevalent. A lot of the problems with this is early days of pre-stress concrete. And it was not necessarily clear how long these structures would last. And that's why a whole lot of pre-stress concrete, thin-shell concrete buildings of that era, stuff like that, they're starting to have serious problems. You get a couple really great renovations or those things are just going to get demolished, right? Or they're going to fall in on their own. But I think this was a particularly, it is structurally innovative, but it turns out the innovation was bad. You probably shouldn't have done that. It's an interesting idea that turned out to not be good. Yeah. Well, at least he didn't repeat this idea a

bunch of times around the world. Those bridges have not also been, no, the same thing happened in Libya. Like the bridge didn't fall down. They just had to replace a bunch of shit. So that's the Ponte Miranda. Also, I'd like to note that we got through this entire thing without releasing what I named the slideshow. So well done us. Yes. You called it? No, no. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yeah. Collapsing, you know, and I only say that because it was Alice and I were throwing this together again this morning because we are, we feel bad when we don't release content to you. Disgusting, ugly, sweating hogs. Well, the content just like we have to get it out of us because the content just

sort of generates itself and we have to like purge ourselves. Yeah. We're chiseling from the marble. Really, you know, we're just the translator of what's in the marble. That's right. Now, I will say I totally forgot. Whatever. Fuck it. What do we learn? I don't know. You don't need, I hate to say this because I understand doing things for aesthetic reasons, but like stop fucking innovating and engineering. Stop it. Stop it. Stop it. It's all bad. It's all bad. So the big podcast dartboard with a picture of Santiago Calatrava on it that we all share. I got to say I am anti-prestress concrete. I think the whole concept of reinforced concrete in general, I think was a bad idea. I think we should avoid it.

That's your rebar action. Yeah. Just use regular concrete or I don't know, maybe you could do like mass timber or something like that. That's pretty durable. Timber bridge. Yeah. That's sort of like a 1890s railroad field. Trestles. Yeah. Oh my God. The Astro Blajor. At least we stopped our fire chiefs from drinking so much. Mostly. Mostly. But yeah. I make your structures easy to inspect and maintain. Yeah. Don't give it to robots. Get a person. Just get a guy. Just have a guy doing it. Just a guy with binoculars. I want to shout out someone. I can't believe I'm doing this. Sure. Whoever runs, well, there's your trans.blogspot.com and does fan transcriptions of, well,

there's your problem. Oh, fuck. That's so cool. Oh, thank God. Yo, that's pretty fucking dope. I tried transcribing this shit for the subtitles and no, I couldn't do it. You deserve some credit. That's real fucking cool. Yeah. Thank you very much. Very much. Yes. All right. We have a segment on this podcast called Safety Third. I'm sorry. I wrote like 70% of the... Not you. Not you. You're good. I love you. You're not the problem. Hello. Roz, Liam and Alice. Shut up. Exclamation point. Nailed it. No guest. Your podcast has gotten me through the first week. Your podcast has got me through the first week of the post-row world. Also, have you noticed that in 2022, the 24th of the month has been cursed

about half the time I have? That's true of like any date you could pick. Yeah. August is a particularly cursed month for me personally, so just hope we get this out without incident. I think April is the cruelest month. It's not much, but here's my Safety Third. I read this and it's not much as an understatement. You're putting yourself down. I used to work for a landlord. And part of my job was to take in calls for maintenance. With that in mind, let me take you on a quick tour of when poorly installed pecs tubing flooded an apartment building. The building had been converted from an old rooming house

into many bizarrely shaped apartments. That's exhibit one. Oh, that is a weird building. What the fuck? That's a nice Victorian house right there. You're a nice Victorian house. What's that roof gable doing? Oh, that? Yeah. Don't worry about that. That's a Southeast Pennsylvania thing right there. You put the other gable over the bay window. You're like, yeah, I got to make my house have a hat. It's jaunty ass face. It's very jaunty. Yes. You can see, look at that lovely whimsical building. You got to paint it over a transom window. All of this has been painted white when it should be several colors.

Anyway, the contractor who was a dubiously licensed outfit that was known to leave creative solutions trademark behind in every job and install the dishwasher in the top floor unit. We advertise the unit as newly remodeled and it rented quickly. The tenants had the usual complaints, but harped often about the lead paint disclosure form they had to sign before moving in. There was capital N, no known lead in the building. And why do I have to sign the lead paint disclosure? About a year in, I got a frantic call saying the dishwasher was flooding the apartment. The usual response was to tell them to use the red shutoff valve under the sink and wait

for maintenance to show up. Knowing that's an air quotes, knowing that this had an easy temporary fix. I told the tenant to use the shutoff valve, as I said, to turn the red valve to which they gave a single sharp ha in reply. That sounds like my dad. The phone started to ring with two other calls coming in with a slightly ominous feeling. I answered the other calls. They were from the same building from tenants on the first floor reporting water coming in through their light fixture. That's one of the things you don't want water coming in through. It was later discovered of the creative contractor installed the dishwasher in the top floor unit using a shark bite clamp. That's number two here.

And an extreme bend on the pecs tubing, which is number three here, which I later learned is a guarantee for failure because it will eventually just pop free. Aren't the 90 degree plumbing parts like pretty commonly everywhere? Yes, there's one right here, but that's like made of brass. That's expensive. Would not normally be a major problem saved that the clamp was above the shutoff valve, leaving absolutely no way to shut off the water. The first maintenance guy on the scene after discovering the problem in the apartment went to shut off the water in the basement, only to find that the shutoff had been permanently locked

in the open position. And the only way to shut off the water would be to shut it off at the street. He called doing for me and I called the city since it was there shut off. Ampersand. That's that's one of those corrupted ampersands right there. It says and amp. Right. Oh, I hate those. It's terrible when that happens. Ruins the whole day. Anyway, that's the park test. No. And we needed their key. After getting a brush off that the city would be there in 24 hours, I used my very best Karen voice to say that I would hold them responsible for flooding almost a dozen apartments. And very quickly, they had someone on the scene.

How do you fit a dozen apartments in this? Real carefully. I was about to say, yeah, it's like, well, they mentioned like weird shaped apartments. This is sort of like Tetris. Hmm. You got room for you got room for a twin bed and a sink and be grateful. That's it. Yeah. Yeah. A toilet all the same room. Literally shitting where you eat because there's no other option. Someone who is as unequipped as all of us to turn off the water because of the fucked up Victorian roaring 20s lot design. Hmm. Or the person who was on the scene. Yes. You can see you have the street. You have the street. You have the lots. You have the lot in

question, right? And the building is down here, right? The lot had at some point been halved like a Republican had been told to gerrymander it to win another seat on the city council. And the shut off valve was on a different street inside someone's fenced yard behind a locked gate. Yes. Yes, I like this. This is good planning. Don't do that. The blue lines are the original lots, right? As you can see here, the green and purple indicate where this particular lot was split in a Republican half, right? Like, like so. Yeah. The building on Smith Street was the old carriage house of the building on Joan Street, right? It had been converted to a residence sometime in the 1930s.

After deciding to cut the lock on the gate, the city was finally able to shut off the water of the building, but not before thousands of gallons of water had been pumped up to the top floor and flooded back down through all the apartments. Also, remember the lead paint disclosure form? Vividly. Well, during repairs and restoration, it was discovered not only was the buildings, but not only was the buildings paint almost all lead. All your kids like that. Every story was found to have asbestos in the linoleum and the tiling. Lastly, in an ironic twist of fate, the year after the full asbestos remediation was completed, the building burned down. Well, that's what happened when you take the asbestos out. It was good fireproof.

Yeah, I was about to say. I should have left that in there. If you leave it where it is, it's not that bad. It's fine. Asbestos is fine until you start. The only people who get mesothelioma are people who work with asbestos. You're not like cutting it up or playing with it or whatever. It's probably fine, ish. Good idea to leave it in place if it's there. Anyway, I have proof of it if you need it. Anyway, no, I believe you. Yeah, I believe you. With love, A. Fantastic. Thank you. The letter A. This podcast brought to you by the letter A. All right. That was that was the podcast. Does anyone have any commercials before we go?

Next episode, the Boston molasses disaster. I would advertise the trash future live show but in Edinburgh, but it's sold out already. So don't show up to that anymore. We can't let you in. Don't show up. Yeah. Don't go to Edinburgh Fringe. Well, go and see Milo's show. He has dates for that. That's on all month. The Edinburgh Fringe. Listen to all of my other shit. Kill James Bond. Trash Future. Liam? 10,000 losses and lions live by doggies. We have business to talk about after. Okay. Bye, everybody. This is too early to announce our live show. Yes. That was why I was saying business. Okay.

All right. Bye, everyone.