It took a year to build the Empire State Building, and 5 years to build the Hoover Dam yet current estimates for the Francis Scott Key bridge rebuild are near 10 years. Why is this? Have we regressed?
In: Engineering
Besides the other factors mentioned here (safety and environmental considerations being the largest), both the Empire State Building and the Hoover Dam were built in the middle of the Great Depression, so there was an essentially unlimited supply of (cheap) labor for the projects. Today most construction companies can barely find enough people to put together large enough crews for highway maintenance projects. The FSK bridge was having potholes repaired at 130am by a small crew of immigrant workers from Mexico and Guatemala when it collapsed.
The Key bridge as an overall project took 29 years to build (4-lane approaches completed in 1999). This doesn’t include design and procurement time, 2-5 years or so.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Scott_Key_Bridge_%28Baltimore%29
You are wrong in citing as an example the Hoover Dam. Planning for the Dam started in 1922 and the Dam didn’t finish until 1936. The US passed funding for it in 1928, and construction didn’t start until 1931. They need to remove the wreckage. Plan the bridge. Find the money. Put it out to bid. Assemble the materials and personnel. Deal with permitting, environment, and safety concerns. Then build it without blocking river traffic.
Well for one, you’re comparing apples to oranges here. Bridges, buildings, and dams are 3 completely different construction projects and should not be compared. And two, the original construction of the Francis Scott key Bridge took 5 years to complete from 1972-1977, but they didn’t have to deal with a previously collapsed bridge. Now they have to essentially clean the entire area of debris, remove/build around the current “bridge”, and *then* construct the bridge.
During the construction of the Empire State Building, five workers were officially reported to have died. Rumors circulated (particularly among newspapers with an agenda) that up to 42 people died, however. I have a feeling that the truth is somewhere in between.
That sort of fatality rate is considered unacceptable today and much more emphasis is put on safety.
Safety standards, more advanced engineering, and unique challenging factors to the situation with the Key bridge.
The biggest two are the existing debris from the bridge collapse and the water traffic from shipping. The water way is *very* busy and can’t be just shut down to put in the tools, people, and equipment needed to build a replacement bridge quickly.
People like to point to chinese construction as an example of china being more efficient, but their speed comes at serious costs. In safety for the workers, the environmental impact of their materials and methods, and the longevity of the projects. There’s a reason that “tofu dreg” construction in china is a recurring joke about the problems their buildings face.
Every answer here is some variation of “planning” or “safety standards” or “environment”. The answer is that, while all of those are different in degree from the past, the biggest issue is uncertainty because of lawsuits. You may expect that, to build a large project, you create a whole plan and submit it to a government office who provides feedback and when everything is good, you get a permit and get to start building. In functional countries, this is how it works. In the US, instead, there is no one-stop government office that gives you the go-ahead. Instead, there are multiple offices that require their own review, who can simply say they won’t sue you if you start building, but others till might—and many groups of citizens do.
Essentially, anyone can sue to stop the project at any time, for any reason. This is frequently done under the auspices of environmental review, but the actual objectives are varied. Some people don’t want it to be built, so they sue to make the project so expensive it never gets built. Some times labor simply wants more money, so they sue to delay the project until it’s financially better to just pay them to finish. Ezra Klein has dubbed it the “vetocracy”: https://www.vox.com/2020/4/22/21228469/marc-andreessen-build-government-coronavirus
112 workers died in three construction of the hoover dam with another 42 dying of pneumonia, probably caused by the working conditions.
Five died building the empire state building.
Health and safety saves lives but costs money and time.
The empire state building took a year to build from breaking ground. Design probably took a year or two at least before that at least. Lead time to plan, prepare, budget and design are not quick or easy. I do demolition plannimg work. You see buildimgs that are imploded in seconds. But it probably took 3 to 5 years to get to that point.
Safety standards could come into it. There’s that infamous picture of workers eating lunch on top of a skyscraper frame, which would be a huge violation today.
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