The bridge at Memphis has barge traffic on the Mississippi shut down. Not good at all. A lot of freight goes under that bridge. Will shut down everything coming from or too ocean ports in the gulf using the Missouri. river. I think the Arkansas river to Tulsa, Ft Smith Little Rock and Pine bluff will still be open.

https://www.thetrucker.com/trucking...over-mississippi-river-could-take-months

How convenient for the dolt and his infrastructure plan.

A LOT of grain and fertilizer goes up and down that river system. If you got an old hopper bottom out in the pasture it might be a good time to patch any holes in the tarp and start calling brokers like tall grass.....

Well the hackers of the Colonial Pipeline got $5 million. What's a river worth?

Demand for diesel about to go up and probably the price. Off loading at the ports in Little Rock and Pine Bluff going to get busy.

I saw a report yesterday that the I40 bridge across the Mississippi at Memphis is closed due to a cracked beam identified during a routine inspection. That's got to be inconvenient for a lot of folks. Apparently the barge traffic shutdown is due to the concern of the bridge collapsing despite traffic over the gridge having been stopped. A google search shows photos and video of the crack.

A little Gorilla glue goes a long way.

Have that Big Guy with the Flex Seal fix it.

Yep, then wrap it with duct tape....Indestructible

Each flat boat often carries eighty semi loads of material . Generaly the barges down there consist of 24 or more of those tied together . I've never been across that bridge that I didn't see at least 1 barge . That's alot of extra raffic on the highways

Sad day when pirates, looters, black mailers, and arsonists carry out their trade and they are paid off as a business expense.

I am sure some will go by rail

Barge traffic will resume shortly I'd bet. Most likely with some restrictions in place but they will be running regardless.

Opening it back up to barge traffic this morning.

Ol dad

Doesn't that bridge have multiple spans? Just route through an uncracked span.

you and I think of that in a couple minutes , beaurocracy shuts everything down and takes 2 days to come to a 2 minute solution.

to be fair they probably needed to fully finish the inspection to be able to say the other span wasn't cracked before sending anything under

Probably working on an environmental impact statement or some other nonsense.

my first thought was well it hasn't fallen yet , start grinding the fillet and get some rods we can weld that up then sister it up and be running traffic by Monday

but I guess some one maybe should determine the load on that with the price of steel , you know we wouldn't want to use up any extra

Reminds me of the construction projects we did in the service. By the time LT finished with his field manuals and calculations Old Sarge had the project well under way and on track.

The photos show what appears to be large structural tubing beam (square cross section) that is completely broken. As such it was not carrying any load since failure. That means other parts of the bridge had to carry the load the broken beam should have been carrying, a load they were not designed to carry. Depending on how long the beam was broken other parts of the bridge could also be damaged and close to failure. Only a complete inspection would determine the extent of damage. Given that all traffic over the bridge was stopped, also stopping barge traffic seems a bit of overkill but that's just one person's opinion.