Genoa bridge collapse a disaster waiting to happen

Celebrated designer:

The Morandi bridge was built between 1963 and 1967. It has a maximum span of 219 metres, a total length of 1.18 kilometres, concrete piers (vertical structures that support the arches of a bridge) that reach 90 metres in height.

The technology of prestressed reinforced concrete used in the construction was the hallmark of its designer, the celebrated Italian engineer Riccardo Morandi, who died in 1989. Dubbed patent “Morandi M5”, he had used the technology for other works, including a wing of the Verona Arena in 1953.

This technique also characterises another, even longer and just as problematic Morandi bridge: the 8.7-kilometre long General Rafael Urdaneta Bridge that spans the bay of Maracaibo, Venezuela, and was completed in 1962.

Structural doubts:

On Tuesday specialist engineering website “Ingegneri.info” published a piece that highlighted how the bridge had always presented “structural doubts”, calling it “a tragedy waiting to happen”.

Lending support to the website was Antonio Brencich, a professor of reinforced concrete construction at the University of Genoa, highlighting the constant maintenance the bridge needed.

“It was affected by extremely serious corrosion problems linked to the technology that was used. Morandi wanted to use a technology that he had patented that was no longer used afterwards and that showed itself to be a failure,” said Brencich to Radio Capitale,

In 2016 Brencich he spoke with “Ingegneri.info” about construction going over budget and poor calculations over concrete viscosity that led to an uneven road surface which wasn’t fully corrected until the 1980s.