Is it just me or does anyone else think that there is no way the lorry with the digger on it hit that bridge? I know that looking at photos and videos only gives a very limited number of visual perspectives, however several things stick out to me.

The white artic in the left lane was clearly moving at the time the bridge section came down. It’s quite impressive the way the section cut through the trailer. I would say it was only fortuitous timing that stopped it making an equally impressive (and deadly) impact on the front of the cab. I think the only reason the fallen section has moved “forward” from directly under the supports it because of this white lorry.

The low loader with the digger on is on the hard shoulder and by my reckoning was either stationary or very close to it when the section came down. I say this because there appears to be no damage to the cab or the digger. The bridge section is just sat across the front half of the trailer. If the arm of the digger had struck the bridge hard enough to bring it down surely it would show damage and/or have moved the digger somewhat. Yes loads are, or at least should be, secured well but we’re talking a lot of force and weight moving here.

Interestingly one news site ( http://www.kentonline.co.uk/malling/news/what-investigation-into-m20-bridge-101508/ ) show what looks like a still from a Highways Authority traffic camera, the type you can access on the net to check conditions. But no-one is streaming the actual video. I guess blaming a lorry driver is safer than admitting that your bridge may have possibly failed..

By the way I’m not a lorry driver..

not sure it really has much significance as a conspiracy theory for them to lie. Unless it was a bridge to a secret government bunker.

You cans see in a few shots that the front of the digger knuckle is white and dusty.

Side on show here is the clearest and shows the levels:

Does look like it’s shunted the bridge deck tbh.

and dont forget the plant trailer is now all bend and flattened due to the weight of the brufge so would probably be about 1ft higher which does look to put the base of the bridge deck at the right level.

Hard to tell from angles. But the gantry *before* the bridge looks to have the same height

I agree with your main point though, if that had hit it at speed then it doesn’t add up – maybe the Lordy was on the hard shoulder going really slowly at the time?

I was thinking the same last night – if the digger had hit the bridge at speed im pretty certain it would have shifted on the trailer but from the tv footage it looked fine. However looking at the pics online the digger truck is on the hardshoulder – I’m wondering if he knew he was a little on the high side and tried slowly creeping under, nudged the bridge and it landed on the DAF on the inside lane. Either way – lucky nobody killed.

edited to add – no such thing as bad publicity;

Auto renovations website;
“Bandwidth Limit Exceeded

The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to the site owner reaching his/her bandwidth limit. Please try again later.”

Above pic. does support “digger hit bridge” statement. I assume that the lowloader was on the hard shoulder due to either fault or lack of speed to get up the incline. Going to be a fun time between the insurers and the highway agency, related to min. heights. The reversal of the bucket must have made loading arrangement awkward – not able to get boom low.

Removal footage here Beeb website

Astonishing that there were no fatalities.

Please don’t start with the conspiracy theory line. Sometimes people are wrong and sometimes they lie for their own interests, the news and authorities included.

It does look like dust on the arm. I suppose it’s possible that the driver suspected he was over height and thought that crawling along the hard shoulder would be the safest option. But something just doesn’t sit right. I’d like to see the camera footage, out of curiosity more than anything

EDIT: I started writing that after the first reply

Please don’t start with the conspiracy theory line

You started that one with your cover up suggestion!

And yes I agree it looks like the loader was on the hard shoulder and probably going very slowly.

I would imagine that the bridge is designed with vertical loads in mind and probably only designed to withstand wind loads from the side. I would imagine a lorry at 30 or 40 mph would exert quite a force.

Please don’t start with the conspiracy theory line. Sometimes people are wrong and sometimes they lie for their own interests, the news and authorities included.

You started it, what exactly would anyone be trying to cover up? Lorry hits bridge, bridge collapses. Hundreds of witnesses.

What conspiracy would you like? Was the Motorcyclist Owen Smith and the driver a die hard union member trying to take him out?

I would imagine that the bridge is designed with vertical loads in mind and probably only designed to withstand wind loads from the side. I would imagine a lorry at 30 or 40 mph would exert quite a force.

While I’m sure you’re correct, it does seem a bit of a shit design if a tap from a lorry will cause a bridge over a busy road to collapse.

A bridge near here got smashed by some ned in a stolen beemer recently, the concrete was pretty much all gone but it stayed standing due to all the steel rebar. I assumed this was a failure mode the designers would have to consider.

While I’m sure you’re correct, it does seem a bit of a shit design if a tap from a lorry will cause a bridge over a busy road to collapse.
A bridge near here got smashed by some ned in a stolen beemer recently, the concrete was pretty much all gone but it stayed standing due to all the steel rebar. I assumed this was a failure mode the designers would have to consider.

And indeed we do.

Engineer 1) how can we make sure our road bridge doesn’t collapse because a truck drove into it.

Engineer 2) we’ll make it taler than the biggest lorry that the rules allow on the road.

Engineer 1) good plan, that will save us billions in trying to over engineer to stop bridges from collapsing when 40tonnes of truck hits them at 56mph and save thousands of lives a year because trucks wont drive into every bridge on the motorway network.

It’s almost like we don’t spend all day drinking tea in our badly fitting suits twiddling our slide rules………

The damage on the other truck is kind of awesome tbh. Also, I like that the lowloader is owned by “auto renovations” “This bridge needs a bit of work, who ya gonna call?”

I drove under that Friday night without a thought.
I can’t understand them saying a vehicle struck the bridge. The armco along the hard shoulder was undamaged before the bridge, an out of control vehicle would have taken out metres of that.
If the height of the plant on the trailer meant it had hit the bridge it would have taken out the gantry before hand

Perhaps the lorry driver has already said he crashed into the bridge? Or perhaps they have footage from the cameras that shows it clearly?

You started that one with your cover up suggestion!

You started it, what exactly would anyone be trying to cover up? Lorry hits bridge, bridge collapses. Hundreds of witnesses.

There’s a big difference between a conspiracy theory and questioning the, what so far in this case appears to be, speculation that’s being published as fact. My opinion on the incident is of course purely speculative as well.

I suppose my first reaction when I hear “conspiracy theory” is to think that asker of a question is being written off as nut who wants to find a conspiracy, that’s my angle and to be fair I know I’m wrong about that sometimes.

It does all seem a bit strange. My initial thought was why was it on the hard shoulder? Is that the type of motorway section where signs tell you to use the hard shoulder when its busy? and is that what was happening at the time ?

As for force transfer, the digger is likely well chained onto the trailer, so movement of the digger will transfer into the trailer and whole rig instantly. Vice versa, that dumps the inertia of what looks to be about 30 to 35 tons of vehicle mass into the nose of arm of the digger where it hits the the bridge when its struck. It probably wouldn’t take much for the bridge section to be pushed off the ledges which its sitting on ( which appears to be whats happened rather than the bridge snapping )

The bridge is cantilevered out from the other side of the motorway and the section the JCB struck is lightweight compared with the stronger bit nearer the support. I think it also slopes downwards towards that side. The low-loader was on the hard shoulder for whatever reason and just striking a couple of inches of the bridge will have forced the knuckle upwards.

The bridge slopes down over the hard shoulder and appears lower than the gantry there. The bridge construction at that point wouldn’t take a lot of force; the span that dropped down was just sitting on supporting nibs at each end, not continuous with the rest of the bridge. The digger boom could push it off the bearings without taking any damage.

The unusual bridge design is why the cantilever span over the other carriageway is still stable – it’s designed to work as a cantilever with half the weight of the collapsed span on it; that’s not there so it has spare capacity, so long as it wasn’t overstressed by the sideways load.

Edit: globalti posted while I was writing, +1

The lorry hit some debris in the carriageway that had fallen from another lorry. That caused the cab to bounce up into the air and hit the gantry.

At least that’s what was on the news earlier but y’know, feel free to carry on with the conspiracy theories if it’s more entertaining.

I hit some debris on the motorway a few years ago, a thin metal girder (again, fallen off a lorry, it was the side trim to a flatbed). Wasn’t fast, certainly no more than 60mph. For a thin bit of metal (maybe 6ft long by about 2″ wide and more or less flat) it wrote the car off – got flicked up by the front wheel, passed under the drivers seat, though the car floor, through both sides of the fuel tank and into the rear suspension unit. Caused the back of the car to lift into the air.

Engineer 2) we’ll make it taler than the biggest lorry that the rules allow on the road.

Engineer 3) Or stick a big steel frame a few yards off it, and set up a camera:

[video]https://www.youtube.com/watch?annotation_id=annotation_82280115&feature=iv&src_vid=xzkWTcDZFH0&v=kkx2_qH_EoA[/video]

Didn’t take long to clear the debris. The motorway is back open.

Are you suggesting that those involved, the witnesses and the police are conspiring to lie about the cause of the accident?

Engineer 2) we’ll make it taler than the biggest lorry that the rules allow on the road.

I wonder where they found that, given there is no maximum height for vehicles in the UK.

Indian Queens bridge on A30 used to claim hydraulic connections at digger knuckles. Not quite enough material to trigger the height sensors before it and made unloading the machines a pain.
Fair bit of guestimation in loading machinery. Knuckle was high, lost out.

Worth noting that bridges, especially “little” foot only ones are quite easy to push sideways because they sit on expansion joints (to er, obviously, allow for lenght wise expansion). These joints mean a decent impact will push the horizontal section of the bridge off it’s piers.

However, i don’t see this being a high speed impact, not enough damage to the diggers jib, or signs of impact damage. Considering the low area of the jib, impacting the bridge at any speed would have resulted in local damage to the concrete of the bridge, and i’d also expect the digger to have been shunted backwards.

I suspect the driver knew it was going to be close, slowed right down, but ended up slowly shunting the span off, at low speed, hence it landed on the bed in front of the jib that knocked it off

And yes I agree it looks like the loader was on the hard shoulder and probably going very slowly.

The first news reports afterwards clearly stated the truck with the digger was moving slowly along the hard-shoulder; it didn’t say why it was on the hard-shoulder, though.
As the horizontal section of the bridge span rests on a joint to allow expansion and contraction, it’s pretty clear to me that the impact of a large, heavy object, the digger knuckle, would be enough to jolt the span along the joint at 90 degrees to the direction it was designed to move, causing it to topple off into the path of the artic in the inside lane, slicing the top off the trailer; the second impact of the truck trailer was probably enough to drag it another couple of feet.
The only question, clearly, was why was the truck moving on the hard-shoulder.

I thought there were expansion gaps at both ends of the section that fell down? Hence why no reinforcing steels.

The top part of the end in the photo above has damage though but that just looks like the end of the top lip has broken off, probably as there was a slight twist as it was hit one end of the span.

I think it was James Bond chasing some baddie. unfortunately he had to use the digger to get at the baddie who was in a low flying helicopter. The bridge got in the way.

So yes it is a cover up, but only to save us all from an evil baddie.

This is a leaked image from moments before

. I wonder where they found that, given there is no maximum height for vehicles in the UK.

The standard is 16ft6 (5m) for motorway bridges, but it can be higher if there’s a reason like roads built to link specific sites (ports which might be moving lots of oversize items). Most vehicles are <4.5m.

This is worse than all the Princess Di conspiracy nonsense.

On the link above, it says the picture on Streetview was from October 2015 and in those pictures, the blue fencing can clearly be seen.

At least 9 months of them being on there which, I presume, are not the fences that the bridge had when it opened.

So what work was being carried out on it ? Could it have sunk a few inches on the section over the Hard Shoulder ?

Like has been said only a small, firm shove would push that off its supports. I’ve seen a road bridge over a motorway hit really hard by one of those tipper trucks that they use on landfill sites.

The driver of that had not lowered the rear skip thing, gone onto the motorway and hit the first bridge he came to. The tipper ended up lodged at 45 degrees against the road and the bridge. The truck, now reduced to cab and chassis, was about 100 yards further up the motorway…..

Road bridges are stronger.

Is it just me or does anyone else think that there is no way the lorry with the digger on it hit that bridge?

Believable.

A few years ago a concrete footbridge near me got tagged by a lorry with scrap cars piled on the back, knocked it scatty and they had to put a new bit of bridge in. Aveley by-pass in Essex.

Bridge bashes by Lgv,s are quite often, usually due to driver negligence in observing height limits of their trailer.

CBRD are doing a write up of the collision tonight on line soon.

Probably sooner rather than later a lgv will cause a derailment after it hits a rail over road bridge, we have been lucky so far.

So what work was being carried out on it ? Could it have sunk a few inches on the section over the Hard Shoulder ?

There are a few pedestrian bridges over the m20 that local kids use for dropping things and firing things at the passing traffic, so I think they were planning on increasing the height of the railings.

Don’t know why it took so long though.

That CBRD article is now online. Took a bit longer as he had to get permission off NPAS Redhill to use the picture

http://www.cbrd.co.uk/articles/m20-bridge-collapse/

This is worse than all the Princess Di conspiracy nonsense.

Princess Di drove a lorry into a bridge? That was hushed up

Looks like a pretty slow news day on Tin Foil Hat News.