Ethics Interstate -35 West Mississippi River Bridge

Ethics

Interstate -35 West Mississippi River Bridge

The collapse of the Interstate-35 West Mississippi River Bridge, which is also known as Bridge 9340, was one of the most dramatic cases of structural engineering failure in the history of the United States within the past five years. The abrupt collapse of the eight-lane structure in Minneapolis, Minnesota on August 1, 2007, which killed approximately 13 people and injured upwards of over 100 travelers, brought to mind several of the traditional ethical issues of engineering in the workplace as many of the deceased and their loved ones agonized over how such a structural failure could take place. Unfortunately, the bridge had a long history of safety issues dating back to 1990 in which it was determined to be deficient by the federal government. Subsequent reports as recent as 2006 found substantial amounts of cracking and weakening in the girders and approach spans, while the bridge's annual inspection by Mn/DOT (which had been conducting such inspections since 1993) was not held in 2007.

Consequently, several ethical issues and perspectives abound in a case as devastating as this particular one. The foremost ethical concern for any structural engineering work should ideally be the safety of those who will be accessing and using the particular structure. The safety of the users of the Interstate 35 West Mississippi Bridge, however, was considerably compromised throughout the years following the bridge's initial construction in the 1960's due to additional weight (primarily in the form of concrete barriers) to the bridge's dead load, which is the amount of weight the bridge must be able to maintain without additional travelers.

The additions to the bridge's dead load was more than likely a gradual process which increased over the duration of several years, yet this process brings forth ethical issues popularized by Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill known as utilitarianism. Utilitarianism is the concept that mandates the ethical or moral worth of an action is judged by the greatest amount of good produced by it. Whatever result the greatest amount of good is produced towards is the most moral or ethical path of behavior. When analyzing the modifications made to the Interstate 35 West Mississippi Bridge, however, one must examine the issue of whether or not the addition of the concrete barriers to this particular structure was worth the plethora of negative ramifications that were induced by the bridge's collapse. Such horrid consequences include, of course, the dead travelers and the effects of their deaths upon their families and friends, as well as the numerous injuries incurred by the several other travelers present, and the consequences of these injuries upon their surrounding environment, family members and friends. Furthermore, the monetary costs of the dilapidated structure must also be considered, in addition to the costs required to construct the bridge's replacement. All of these factors seem to indicate that from a utilitarianism perspective, it was ethically incorrect to increase the bridge's dead load to the point in which the structure itself would give way and ultimately break.

However, the very process by which the increased dead load led to the collapse of the Interstate 35 West Mississippi Bridge must be examined to determine other ethical perspectives on this occurrence. A structure's dead load is one of the primary factors responsible for its creep, which is the rate of strain on a particular material and which, in the case of I-35 West, ultimately caused this construction to collapse. By virtue of the ethical perspective of duty-rights, the construction company which built and/or modified Bridge 9340 should have foreseen the consequences of the increased dead load on the lifespan of the bridge. Due to the rapid rate of crack propagation, a thorough examination of the effects of the load on the bridge's vital supports would have shown that the bridge was enduring a greater than reasonable amount of stress. Furthermore, the long history of the structure's insufficiency alluded to in the opening paragraph of this paper should have informed a developer or applicable engineering company that there was a an imminent responsibility to alleviate the strain of the increased dead load for the sake of the many motorists who utilized the bridge daily. Basic concepts of virtue as well as respect for human life should have galvanized some agency or construction specialist to correct this problem, yet the issue was not resolved until it was too late.