Genoa bridge collapse a sign of things to come if infrastructure maintenance ignored

Abstract

The collapse of the Ponte Morandi in Genoahas shocked the world. People rightly expect that bridges do not fall down. But there are no absolutes — engineering science is not perfect, and there is much we don't yet know. Worse, without structural health monitoring of aged structures, we have little opportunity to learn from failures and make better predictions about future collapses.