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Yeah I mean, fireworks are not HE. Two truckloads of them shouldn't have budged a fricken bridge like this, let alone one.

Unless, maybe a giant load of black powder or some perchlorate that went boom? i.e. pyrotechnic-grade chemical shipment going to a fireworks factory, not fireworks?
 
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The engineering can't have been much worse than the piece of crap Italian engineering the Dutch national railroad company bought:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fyra
Pieces started falling off the first time there was a little bit of frost.
lol the train maker blames the infrastructure. Switzerland has had bad experiences with a series italian trains too.

Anyway this is another problem unrelated to the resistance of infrastructure to disasters.
I don't think we can blame the bridge without knowing how the stuff exploded. If it was really like a bomb it's entirely possible.
 
Where's the steel?


I know nothing about construcion, but with that being said it sure looks to me like there isn't a lot keeping the sections connected. Looks pretty lacking. It makes me wonder if the explosion was really that big, or if the bridge was just that shoddy in design.
 
I know nothing about construcion, but with that being said it sure looks to me like there isn't a lot keeping the sections connected. Looks pretty lacking. It makes me wonder if the explosion was really that big, or if the bridge was just that shoddy in design.
I think it was a combination. A bunch of fireworks going off at the same time is the same as a bomb going off.
 
I know nothing about construcion, but with that being said it sure looks to me like there isn't a lot keeping the sections connected. Looks pretty lacking. It makes me wonder if the explosion was really that big, or if the bridge was just that shoddy in design.

It looks fairly normal to me. Pre-stressed concrete beams, with each span stopping at a structure. That's not to say they didn't screw something up though. The explosion would have been fairly uncontained. Open air in every direction but down. It would take a hell of an explosion to take a bridge out like that.

In the early days of black powder manufacture, buildings were built with a sacrificial wall that would easily blow out, and reduce the overall damage in case of explosion.
 
China has the record on the world's longest bridges by quite a long shot if I remember (I can't remember why I recently-ish googled for 'longest bridges' but anyway). I imagine there are a heck of a lot of extra considerations that need to be made, possibly trade-offs in the design of bridges that are many kilometres long. Perhaps the environmental conditions impose different requirements in construction than wherever the nay-sayers are from. Perhaps in some countries there are more viable alternatives than building bridges covering those sorts of distances.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_longest_bridges_in_the_world

In short, I wouldn't simply disregard their ability to build bridges because of this or because "it's China".
 
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Fireworks made in China and bridge made in China by Chinese workers. One flaw revealed another.

blah blah blah. say want you want about China, but that country pulled over 300 million people out of poverty in one freaking generation. imagine that, almost equivalent to our entire population. it may still suck, but its far better than what they were used to. give it time, China will perfect its safety standards.
 
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