Philadelphia's I-95 overpass COLLAPSES
after massive fire from tanker that burst
into flames underneath: Highway is shut
as authorities battle to prevent further destruction

Perhaps the people in charge got elected by mail in voting.

Must have been steel beam construction. When steel reaches about 900F or so, it loses about half it's structural strength. Since most civil engineering structures are designed with structural safety margins of at least two, when it reaches 50% of normal strength...it's going to very near collapse. Not going to be quickly or easily repaired. Often these beams are not standard wide flange designs, but custom fabricated, with long lead times. Perhaps a workable "temporary" repair can be "cobbled together" using standard beams to keep traffic flowing while the permanent replacement is carried. This assumes competence .....and it's Philly. I wonder how much competence is even possible these days in places like that.

I know a president in exile who was pretty good at using private sector executive skills to get this kind of thing rebuilt immediately.

Great opportunity here for 3 great TV shows rolled into one if you could combine Engineering Disasters, If We Built It Today, and Whose Line is it Anyway.

Aw, come on Poster #3, we have been told by that expert metallurgist Rosie O'Donell, that steel can't burn. Right? /s What a mess. I got caught in back-up traffic about 15 years ago when a tanker caught fire northbound on Interstate 5 in Lynnwood Wa. What should have taken 15 minutes tops, took me over two hours to get to my MIL's house which was about 2 miles away. To get motorists off the freeway, the State Patrol was directing traffic up the entrance ramps to the freeway. It took hours just to get traffic moving again.

Ooops...poster #2, sorry.

The feds and state government are all over this. They have ordered an environmental impact study, a reparations study, an equity study, a diversity study and an inclusion study.

The state of Florida knows rebuild things like this quickly. Decades ago so did California.

After last years hurricane destroyed a causeway in SW Florida, the engineers and DeSantis got it operating in days by cutting red tape using all the available resources. I guess PA and Phil will have to do everything #7 said. Where are they going to find enough oppressed, trans, LQBTG, wymen/persons to work the project?

Wow this is just a couple exits away from the infamous Kensington neighborhood. This will disrupt fentanyl junkie traffic for, gosh, at least 2 hours or more.

Re #8. This happened in Atlanta several years ago. Material under a bridge on I-85 caught fire but they managed to rebuild in record time. Big camp of bums under the bridge is believed to be the initial cause.

With all the mayhem happening in Philly - - how did they even notice this?

This will make Philly traffic even worse than usual.

Won't be long before they pin this on Pres. Trump and Climate Warming.

Re #5,6 - And Idiot Rosie didn't have any concept of "buckling failure", in addition to not understanding that steel dramatically weakens with high temps. The WTC towers were unique structural designs, with their corrugated and relatively thin, compared to the building size. At the top the skin was only about 1/4 inch thick, although inches thick near the bottom. A nearly perfect analog that anyone can "test" with is an aluminum pop can. Filled, with lots of internal pressure pushing out on the sides, preventing the skin (about four one-thousandths of an inch thick) of the can from "crinkling up"....which structural engineers call "buckling failure". But, drain the can and then put about 75 to 100 lbs....and if the can is perfect (no dents or cuts) it will still support a similar load. But when loaded, any damage or even small denting in the side will cause an instant, dramatic total vertical collapse. Stand with half your weight on an empty pop can, on a hard surface like concrete, it will be OK.....then have a friend thump the can with a yard stick...and not hard, and you'll see what happened to the damaged portions of the WTC, carrying millions of pounds of load, when the internal floor support beams, made of lightweight steel truss structures softend and failed. These are very much like what you see if you look up inside a Home Depot or other modern large building without a finished ceiling. Those long steel trusses softened, the weight of their floor and furniture, etc caused them to collapse. After three or five or whatever floors internally collapsed this way....the walls were no longer stabilized, and buckled like the pop can. And once that many millions of pounds "hammer" of the many floors above the failure point had fallen 20 feet or so, it had gained enough energy to be totally unstoppable....smashing downward under relentless gravity, even accelerating as it went. Rosie is an idiot....but she's never in doubt of her own brilliance.

The least Fedderman could do is hold up the bridge. This will give Mayor Pete another chance to wear his crash helmet.

Suspect the Philly Boy Scouts will help. Oops -Philly sued them to accept gays, and after pre-Robert’s Scotus sided w Boy Scouts, Rex Tillerson caved & let gay scouts & ScoutMasters join…PhiilyBoy Scouts are probable extinct.

Well, I didn't have any plans to go in that direction anyway.

Was this another industrial sabotage?

Re #19, a Islamic terror attack on the cheap? Who knows? If not, let's hope that it doesn't give the 7th century barbarians any ideas. I don't imagine that stealing a tanker truck full of fuel would be particularly difficult.

After we banned asbestos (insulation), heat failure of steel beams has become more common. Remember that WTC construction was halted halfway up because of an asbestos ban..my recollection is that construction proceeded with insulation that had not been UL approved

One of their detour suggestions is to cross the bridge into New Jersey and then cross back into Philly after you have passed the closed segment. Those bridges over the Delaware River get choked with traffic on a normal day!

I hope NJTP is not affected!

#7 Gotta hold out for union wages for everything. /s

I associate such infrastructure disasters with India and China. Under Biden and Democrats, disaster happens in our beloved homeland. Banana Republic. Venezuela.

Accurate recollection #21. The upper portion steel trusses were "protected" with a new "fireproofing" which apparently became brittle and flaked off over time. AFAIK, nothing was ever done to solve this. However, these "fireproofing" spray on coatings only delay the temperature rise of the steel for a while, with the intent to buy additional time for evacuation, or to put out the fire before the structure collapses. If the fire continues, even the good coatings with asbestos will eventually let the steel get too hot.

Looks like a trial run for a future mass infrastructure sabotage.

Union leaders in Philly are already counting their windfall.