MINNEAPOLIS — Five years after the bridge over Interstate 35W collapsed into the Mississippi River, killing 13 people and injuring 145, officials say the bridge that replaced it is performing well.
Fitted with hundreds of high-tech sensors that track how the span reacts to weight, vibration and temperature, the new bridge allows researchers to collect data from the span that could change how bridges are designed in the future. In a science lab on the University of Minnesota campus, researchers scroll through a list of numbers on a computer screen. The numbers are raw data produced by 500 so-called “smart bridge” sensors on the new bridge, which opened to traffic in September 2008.
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