Accidents Due To Culvert Failures
Culverts fail due to corrosion of the materials they are made from, or erosion of the soil around or under them. If the failure is sudden and catastrophic, it can result in injury or loss of life.
Sudden road collapses are often at poorly designed culvert crossing sites. Water passing through undersized culverts will scour away the surrounding soil over time. This can cause a sudden failure during medium sized rain events. There are more than 5,000,000 culverts currently in use in the United States alone. Continued inspection, maintenance, and replacement of these structures is crucial for infrastructure and safety.
Accidents due to culverts can also occur if a flood overwhelms it, such as with the Jacobs Creek Flood of 2003, or disrupts the road or railway above it, such as with the Bethungra accident of 1885, which killed seven people.
Soil and sand carried through a culvert can wear away the galvanizing of a steel culvert, allowing it to corrode and eventually collapse, disrupting the road or railway above it. This happened at a culvert near Gosford, New South Wales in 2007, killing five.
Read more about this topic: Culvert
Famous quotes containing the words accidents, due and/or failures:
“The day-laborer is reckoned as standing at the foot of the social scale, yet he is saturated with the laws of the world. His measures are the hours; morning and night, solstice and equinox, geometry, astronomy, and all the lovely accidents of nature play through his mind.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Justice is rather the activity of truth, than a virtue in itself. Truth tells us what is due to others, and justice renders that due. Injustice is acting a lie.”
—Horace Walpole (1717–1797)
“Half the failures of this world arise from pulling in one’s horse as he is leaping.”
—Julius Hare (1795–1855)