Eminent safety and quality control expert Dr. Bharat Thakkar (Photo: Mayank Chhaya)
I wrote this for Indica News
By Mayank Chhaya
With its Factor of Safety (FOS) being way lower than it should have been the Morbi bridge was in a sense a disaster waiting to happen, Dr. Bharat Thakkar, an eminent expert on safety of systems and quality control with several papers to his name, has said.
“The FOS of the Morbi bridge was set at 5 or 6 which for the 600 people it carried at the time of the collapse was too low for any kind of bridges,” Dr. Thakkar, a retired professor of mechanical engineering who taught for decades at major U.S. universities, told Indica News.
“In the US and elsewhere globally, the Factor of Safety should be between 30 to 50 with a lifespan of at least 50 years,” he said.
FOS is essentially a load-carrying capacity of a structure beyond what the structure supports. It is about how much stronger a structure should than what is required.
In Dr. Thakkar’s conclusion poor design is the cause of failure. In particular, Dr. Thakkar said it is reflected in the mechanical fatigue properties of the bridge as maybe found in its poor materials.
FOS is the starting point for engineers while designing any structure in order to account for overload and the structure’s capacity to stay intact in the face of it.
From the initial indications it is obvious that the Morbi bridge’s FOS was not something that was seriously accounted for. “I am not qualified to go into what leads to such negligence, whether corrupt practices were involved or there was any political motivation to throw open the bridge. My concern as an engineer is only to point out that the FOS of 5 or 6 is unacceptable for any bridge,” Dr. Thakkar said.
At the heart of the rationale behind FOS is that any structure be built stronger than what is deemed necessary in order that it withstands any emergency of the kind the Morbi bridge experienced in terms of overload.
Building bridges is a complex exercise which takes into account factors such as ductile materials versus brittle materials. While the former deforms considerably under pressure before eventually breaking, the latter breaks at the point it meets the maximum force.
It is not Dr. Thakkar’s case that these factors were not considered or understood but simply that they need to be kept at the center of any such construction.
“No one will ever build for the FOS with 5 or 6. The bridge was built for 150 people maximum for daily use. It collapsed when 500 to 600 people were on it,” Dr. Thakkar said.
“The designers must consider dynamic effects. This Morbi bridge experienced dynamic effect due to people walking and playing with it because it was a hanging bridge. It is not people’s fault playing with the structure. Anyone would like to test it out of curiosity because it was newly opened to the public. However, even a scratch in wires can cause stress concentration up to 100 times,” he said.
It was a measure of Dr. Thakkar’s expertise that he was the first expert to say that the Vikram lunar lander of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) likely crashed at about 184 miles per hour, a speed at which nothing of value could have survived.
“Vikram was designed for soft landing. Is it true that there was no contingency in design for a free fall any time during moon landing or any other time during Chandrayaan-2 mission? Expecting Vikram to function after a free fall is a false hope similar to a ‘dead person’ coming alive. Pulling the plug on ‘brain dead’ is the right attitude. Expecting for divine intervention is very much cultural phenomenon in India,” he said.
Although Dr. Thakkar’s scientifically sound explanation was met with a mix of skepticism and even some anger in certain quarters, eventually it turned out to be the case.
He said, the Morbi bridge collapse “is a much worse failure than Vikram simply because so many lives have been lost which could have been saved had attention to detail such as the FOS as well as maintenance was paid.”
“Structures are as much about building them as about maintaining them. It seems to me there is failure here on both those counts,” he said.