LogFAQs > #979573109

FFDragon posted...

Yeah I knew we had a concrete expert (dante), but didn't know we had actual bridge expert until now!

Feels kinda weird being called an expert in anything when I'm not some renowned engineer, not gonna lie lol. Though I guess compared to the average person, this is true.

Might be something of a sidebar, but I've also been in the center of this type of thing before - I work for the Georgia DOT and was on the team that designed the fix for the interstate bridge that collapsed in Atlanta when a homeless person started a fire under the bridge that had a ton of PVC conduit stored underneath it. Obviously not the same situation or the same cause, but I've experienced what it's like when all the fingers turn around and start pointing at you lol. So I'd just advise that once the emotions wear off and people begin to look for someone to take responsibility, make sure that you take news stories and things you hear from people with a grain of salt and try to react proportionately to the news that comes out and is verified. Because it can get rough out there lol.

The conspiracy theories are honestly the easy ones to deal with, they ranged from GDOT doing it on purpose to funnel money to a contractor (which is wrong, but at least plausible) to GDOT doing it to kill poor people and cut them off from each other as a first step in the rich forming a new world order. It's ridiculous that they gained traction at all, but they were easier to combat.

Local media was honestly the biggest issue and created misinformation (probably unknowingly) due to just not knowing enough about the topic and racing to be the first one to get the story out. There was one channel that was really interested in painting us as grossly negligent (more than we already were for storing the damn PVC under the bridge) and tried to use stuff from inspection reports of the bridge to simultaneously say that we were negligent in maintaining the bridge, and that we aren't inspecting well enough because we said it was in good condition yet it collapsed. When the reality is they didn't understand how to interpret inspection reports (and that no bridge is going to survive an hours-long chemical fire), but the people that heard their reporting didn't know that so people constantly went after us over what they heard on the news. Another channel claimed that we were just taking the rubble from the bridge, wrapping it in reinforced fiber material, and just putting the bridge back up like that with no other remediation. Which to this day I do not understand how they could have in good faith thought that's what we were doing, but we had to do a ton of PR just to convince people we weren't idiots after that. My personal favorite was when we got the bridge opened faster than we said we would, then everyone pivoted from "DOT's going to take years to fix this it'll take forever they're so dumb" to "No, no, no, that was too fast, this bridge can't be safe."

All that to say that I hope everyone's able to be careful with what's reported and advise people they know to do the same. These high profile collapses always follow the same pattern, and this one appears to be no different.