Leading engineer pins blame on ‘not very practical architect’

A leading Italian engineer has claimed that the Genoa viaduct that collapsed was an ‘‘engineering failure’’ that should have been knocked down.

Antonio Brencich, a professor of engineering at the University of Genoa, said that Riccardo Morandi, the architect who designed the bridge in the 1960s, had ‘‘great intuition, but was not very practical at calculations’’.

He said the bridge was continuously being fixed ‘‘thanks to corrosion after Morandi built it using a technique he patented which was not used again and was evidently a failure’’.

He said the steel cables supporting the bridge had been given a rust-proof covering which failed to work. ‘‘It wasn’t what he hoped for and the tower that collapsed needed serious maintenance 20 years after it was built.’’

In an interview two years ago, Brencich remarked that the cost of upkeep would outstrip the cost of simply knocking the bridge down and rebuilding it from scratch. ‘‘Sooner or later it will have to be replaced,’’ he said. ‘‘I don’t know when. There will come a time when the cost of maintenance is superior to the cost of replacing it.’’

Critics say Morandi, who died in 1989, got his sums wrong, failing to account for the concrete’s shifting shape over time.

Autostrade, Italy’s private motorway operator, said yesterday that work to shore up the foundations had been under way at the time of the collapse.

The Genoa bridge is not the only structure built in Italy by Morandi that has experienced serious problems. A viaduct more than three kilometres long that was built near Agrigento, Sicily, in 1970 has been closed because of fears of an imminent collapse. Magistrates have begun an investigation into its construction. Another viaduct built in 1968 by Morandi at Licata, also in Sicily, was closed in 2015 and later reopened to light vehicles only. Last year there were reports that the concrete was crumbling.

Morandi’s most prominent work is the General Rafael Urdaneta Bridge, a larger version of the Genoa bridge that spans eight kilometres across Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela. – The Times