Yes a lot of our infrastructure is well past it’s use by date thanks to decisions based on election cycles and “ deferrered” maintainance..... there are a few silver linings the odd bridge is way over engineered from back in the day when some bloke free of Wellington interference was able to build stuff by eye or use extra concrete and steel instead of trucking it back to town...
NZTA surveyed nearly all bridges during introduction of HPMV trucks. One very old bridge they banked on having to replace turned out to be good for 62 Ton as is.
Then there’s the “earthquake” strengthening that they keep doing to Mohaka bridge on SH5 with its upside down arch, that they keep doing after “finishing” the “ earthquake” strengthening. The welders working on the job did some work for us and they said a similar bridge in USA collapsed and only reason ours hadn’t is the part in question was 15mm steel instead of 12mm.
As per my first paragraph the same reason cause monthly if not weekly bridge failures in USA.
We’ve just been lucky here that prob mother nature’s storms have dealt to most of them at times when few are on roads.
The real elephant in the room though is our hydro dams....
Govt gives you nothing because it creates nothing - Javier Milei
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Originally Posted by Katman
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