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Record W4409154640 · doi:10.5006/37692-ch12

The Quebec Bridge Collapse (1907): An Engineer's Perspective to Avoid Catastrophic Failures

2025· book-chapter· en· W4409154640 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

Venuenot available
Typebook-chapter
Languageen
FieldEngineering
TopicStructural Response to Dynamic Loads
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsBridge (graph theory)Forensic engineeringCatastrophic failurePerspective (graphical)EngineeringComputer scienceMaterials scienceMedicine

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract The failure assessment of the collapse of the Quebec Bridge in 1907 conducted by the Royal Commission is discussed in the following paper. The Quebec Bridge is a 987.5 m long; 29 m wide; and 104 m high riveted steel truss structure which collapsed not once but twice during construction. The reason for the bridge failure was attributed to member behavior and stability proved by experimental work conducted following the collapse by Royal Commission. The bridge was finally completed in 1917 and has been in operation since then. The lessons learned from the bridge collapse were pivotal in the advancement of engineering design, fabrication and formation of the two organizations, namely - the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) in 1914 and American Institute of Steel Construction (AISC) in 1921. The author highlights the importance of validating the design criteria and specifications by material and load testing, conducting peer reviews, design control, and paying attention to details. The lessons learned reinforce the need to establish and monitor shop fabrication practices, inspection procedures and gates (witness, hold and review points) to safely complete the execution of any civil engineering project, be it onshore or offshore construction.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMeta-epidemiology (narrow)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Other · Consensus signal: Other
Teacher disagreement score0.906
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0010.000
Research integrity0.0000.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.006
GPT teacher head0.223
Teacher spread0.216 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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