Lessons Learnt from Bridge Collapse: A View of Sustainable Management

Abstract

Bridge failure is one of the worst infrastructural disasters. This paper investigates the risk of bridge infrastructures in the view of sustainable management. Statistics on bridge failures from 2009 to 2019 in China show that most of these failures are related to anthropic factors. The collapse of the Zijin Bridge on 14 June 2019 in Heyuan City of Guangdong Province, China is used as a case to perform detailed analysis. Superficially, bridge collapse is a technical problem rather than a management problem. However, the deep reason for this kind of bridge failure may be due to the lack of sustainable management. In order to verify this point of view, both fault tree analysis (FTA) and strategic environmental assessment (SEA) for the bridge failure and later impact on society are conducted. According to the FTA results, the failure of the arch foot is the direct trigger of the Zijin Bridge collapse. Since a lack of real-time monitoring, risk assessment and other management issues are potential factors causing bridge collapse, strategic environmental assessment (SEA) is used to investigate the management issues related to the economy, culture, human health and environmental sustainability in more depth. The low total SEA result shows poor project management and a high safety risk. Finally, the specific managerial measures are proposed to improve the sustainability of infrastructures.

Bridge failures, forensic structural engineering and recommendations for design of robust structures

“…The country-based analysis of bridge failures is not presented to avoid biased results, as the available database does not cover all bridge failures that occurred worldwide in the given period. This decision is validated with more recent research from India [19] and China [20], which is not included in IABSE database as the data is not available to public. For example, [19] shows that over 2000 complete or partial bridge failures occurred during last four decades in India alone, while the paper [20] describing the failure of Zijin Bridge states that in China 418 partial or complete bridge failures occurred in the period between 2009 and 2019.…”

Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment for Multi-Criteria Decision Making in Bridge Design: A Review

“…Bansal et al (2017) assess the sustainability of two bridge projects under construction in Delhi over the Yamuna River. Tan et al (2020) investigates the management of the recently collapsed Zijin Bridge in China, including sustainable criteria in the evaluation. Sasmal and Ramanjaneyulu (2008) apply fuzzy-based AHP for the condition evaluation of concrete bridges.…”

Learning How to Learn from Disasters through a Comparative Dichotomy Analysis: Grenfell Tower and Hurricane Katrina Case Studies

“…In the field of disaster risk reduction, learning has been addressed in the literature from various perspectives. For example, learning through a participatory process for the community with respect to flood risk management [7], learning from crisis management exercises [8,9], learning from natural disasters [10,11] and impacts on supply chain resilience [12], learning from disasters and their impacts on middle managers [13] and learning from humanitarian logistics for facility locations [14].…”