El puente de Morandi sobre el Lago de Maracaibo no ha sido inspeccionado en décadas (FOTOS)

Como si de una simple casualidad se tratase, el puente Morandi que se derrumbó este martes en Génova dejando a 39 fallecidos y entre 15 a 20 desaparecidos tiene una réplica y está en Venezuela. El puente Rafael Urdaneta mejor conocido como el puente sobre el Lago de Maracaibo fue construído por el mismo arquitecto, el italiano Riccardo Morandi en 1962 en el estado Zulia, publica abc.es.

Cinco años después, en 1967 fue inaugurado el viaducto en Italia que la ingenería la consideró «una obra maestra». Sin embargo, expertos han señalado que una estructura tan grande presenta muchos problemas de corrosión y deterioro que su mantenimiento debe ser sistemático y por lo tanto, requiere un presupuesto muy elevado.

Después del hundimiento estructural de unos 100 metros del puente Morandi, ha surgido la preocupación de los expertos por el puente de Maracaibo porque temen que su mantenimiento se haya descuidado en medio del colapso económico cada vez más profundo de la Venezuela socialista.

Marcelo Monnot, expresidente del Centro de Ingeniería del estado de Zulia, dijo que las vigas de acero que proporcionaban el soporte estructural principal del puente no habían sido inspeccionadas durante décadas, según ha informado el diario británico «The Times».

El segundo puente más largo de América del Sur tiene ocho kilómetros que atraviesa la parte más angosta del lago. Fue construido en hormigón armado, tiene 134 pilares ancladas a una profundidad de 60 metros y soporta un tráfico promedio de 45.000 vehículos diarios. Mientras que el viaducto de Génova se encontraba situado entre los barrios de Sampierdarena y Cornigliano, tenía una longitud de un kilómetro, una altura de 45 metros y tres pilares de hormigón que alcanzaban los 90 metros.

ORIGINAL EN INGLÉS

Venezuela’s Morandi highway hasn’t been inspected in decades
Stephen Gibbs, Caracas | Oliver Moody
August 17 2018, 12:01am,
The Times

The second longest bridge in South America, which spans the entrance to the Maracaibo lake in Venezuela, bears a striking similarity to the collapsed Genoa bridge for good reason: it was designed by the same architect.

The five-and-a-half-mile General Rafael Urdaneta bridge was completed in 1962, five years before its Italian “twin”. Experts have expressed concern that its maintenance has been neglected in the midst of socialist Venezuela’s deepening economic collapse.

Marcelo Monnot, former president of the Engineering Centre of Zulia state, said that the steel beams which provided the bridge’s main structural support had not been inspected for decades.

There has long been lax control over the load of vehicles crossing the bridge, he added. “The weighing system has not worked for years, so it is not calculating the weight of the cargo vehicles, which represents a risk.”

Last week an electrical cable on the bridge caught fire, plunging the city of Maracaibo — the centre of Venezuela’s oil industry — into darkness for several hours. There are suspicions that the cable was overloaded. The government said that it was sabotage.

“They did not properly evaluate the damage that fire did to the structure,” Nora Bracho, a local opposition politician, said. The bridge, which is the main link between Maracaibo and the rest of the country, reopened, albeit to reduced traffic.

The bridge has already suffered one serious accident. In 1964 it partly collapsed after an Esso oil tanker collided with one of its central piers. Seven people died when four cars crossing the bridge fell into the lake.

An alternative bridge, which is meant to take some of the load from the General Rafael Urdaneta, has been under construction for the past 11 years but is only 17 per cent completed. Ms Bracho said that what had started out as a $2 billion project had already overspent by $22 billion.

The Genoa disaster has also prompted soul-searching in Germany, where years of parsimonious infrastructure spending have left some major road bridges crumbling away. An investigation by Der Spiegel has found that about 5,000 of the country’s 40,000 bridges are in poor condition.

A bridge over the Rhine at Leverkusen has been closed to lorries since 2012 after cracks appeared in its concrete. Downriver, the Neuenkamp bridge near Duisburg, which carries 90,000 cars and 10,000 lorries a day, has also had to turn back the heaviest goods vehicles since its cables began to fray.

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