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.
Highlights
Economic boom has sped up urbanization over the past four decades in China
This paper focuses on bridge management in terms of sustainability, in which data analysis and a case study on the managerial reasons for bridge failure and multiple impacts are investigated in detail
This paper investigated the managerial reasons for bridge collapse using fault tree analysis (FTA) and failure-induced environmental impacts using strategic environmental assessment (SEA)
Summary
Economic boom has sped up urbanization over the past four decades in China. Urbanization leads to a continuous increase in demand for urban infrastructures, including bridges, highways, water supply and sewage systems, electric and electronic pipelines and metro systems [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8]. The service life of these infrastructural facilities often falls short of the designed life due to natural phenomena (e.g., earthquakes, floods, typhoons, ground subsidence) and lack of proper expertise and sustainable concept of the management layer [9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16]. Bridge failures are one of the most severe infrastructure problems facing the world today [28] and usually cause significant economic losses and casualties. This has elicited a considerable amount of attention from designers, engineers, researchers, and policy makers [29,30,31]. Bridge failures pose an imminent threat to life and property during their service life, which reinforces the need to implement updated sustainability assessments and optimal risk mitigation procedures [32,33]
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