Slow-Motion Video Of A Bridge Exploding Is The Best Way To Start The Week

Really? Has it come down to this? The first two comments of the article are spam...

Agree with Shockeray. With a site like Wired, I'd like to see a certain degree of protection from this. I wouldn't mind if I had to guess one of those crazy-ass word jumble pictures in order to comment, as long as I don't have to see this.

I don't even understand who these things are targeting. People must be even dumber than I imagine.

Question: Wouldn't it be better to reuse the bridge material?

Looks like a filament giving way to me, with a huge amount of wasted energy. I wonder how much of that energy field could have been harvested? Real world, not in a vacuum.

Probably have to have a good thermionic conductor on either end and be a waiting circuit. Some minimal required flow or other. I wonder if it might be worth looking in to for demolition trades. The energies wasted in demolitions are massive, to the point where it just hurts my head to look at the waste.

@ aerosphere; Answer: It's cost prohibitive to have these taken apart. They've been condemned, which means high risk pay for the laborers. Those laborers MUST be union scale compensation per Federal mandate. That's expensive, and worth far more than that scrap metal; which once dropped, can be salvaged in chunks and cut up by minimally paid people with torches.
The salvage company, the demo company, and the original owner entity of the bridge are all 2 part owners in an inexact amount of the bridge at different instances in time. That by itself is problematic. As to the demo company ownership, once they begin to do the structural prep for a demo, it's their baby. Now as a rule, it is not the salvage doing the demo and that's always puzzled me, because it's inefficient. Salvage companies of scale already have engineers and guys used to working in these risk environments.

I predict that when our troops are back we'll have seen, for the most part, the heyday of the demolition company as it has existed these last decades. Salvers can do demo with soldiers that are being trained up in safety by some pro demo guy who needs the high priced work, and save owners a buttload of money. Demo's would certainly have a hard time taking on the assets of a salver of scale as fast.

It's going to be that way in a lot of trades, where things are going to be made possible as a product of potential by our people coming home.
Some, like medics or Corpsmen, would understandably have to be trained up quite a bit to be a RN, but could easily be much more than an EMT with very little.

PopSci, has anyone thought to do up a piece on that? New trades, efficiencies gained, and trades or occupations potentially due for the chopping block?

Thanks for the information. I appreciate the reply.