Waynowski is right. If four people fall off there's no way a newspaper at least can afford to assign someone to go out to the scene unless it is very close to a road head.
Maybe if four people had died...
In many situations like this papers will relied on contributed pics.
http://www.radionz.co.nz/news/regional/283284/tourists-fall-8m-as-bridge-cable-fails
"Labour conservation spokesperson Ruth Dyson said it was only good luck that the tourists were not seriously injured and the Government needed to assure trampers the bridges were safe.
Ms Dyson said DoC needed an immediate funding boost to carry out the checks.
"For them to undertake safety checks now they will need extra resources, they cannot do it out of their existing budget," Ms Dyson said.
"We cannot afford to have anyone else injured or killed in what is a Department of Conservation facility."
I was thinking more of TV crews who like getting sensationalist pictures of things, or at the very least locals or other trampers on the walk who surely must have gone past and seen it and photographed it. The people who fell seem to have been well protected given nothing's apparently been heard from or about them.
I seem to recall that when @madpom had his adventure some time ago and eventually crawled to that hut, one of the networks took it upon themselves to fly there afterwards and make a deal out of his hut book rant. He'd need to confirm that one though.
this incident didnt have the carnage factor for more media attention
A bridge failure on a great walk should of got better coverage. Hopefully they will replace with a 3 wire bridge
other great walks are having a lot of swing bridges replaced with solid structures. not sure if there is a length limit on structures of those sort, even those not upgraded to solid structures are still getting swing bridges upgraded to more significant structures.
on the routeburn it means you can now probably get a quad bike several k's up the track across the bridges to the routeburn flats hut, although theres one long swing bridge you may have to bypass on the river flat.
Yeah, I get that coverage might not be cheap and easy and I'm sure we'll see a picture from someone eventually, but I'd have thought that what's probably the most significant failure in DoC's tourism infrastructure since 1995, very lucky not to result four deaths, and an apparent possible failure of all the changes put in since 1995, would at least deserve some expense to get a picture or two. I'd presume it might be different if someone had an interview with one of the people who fell, to describe how traumatic the whole thing probably was, or something, but apparently they don't.
This post has been edited by the author on 5 September 2015 at 15:37.
I think Ruth Dyson has jumped the gun a bit, though. DoC's infrastructure is all inspected systematically anyway, so calling for all bridges to be immediately re-inspected doesn't seem too useful until it's established what actually went wrong and inspectors of other bridges would know what to look for.
This post has been edited by the author on 5 September 2015 at 15:38.
yes but if labour get elected we can hold her to account for saying more money should be allocated to doc ;)
It's not a design issue.
After all one cable broke, but the other held even under the shock-loading it experienced at that moment. So we can assume there is plenty of margin in the design.
Therefore something has undermined the design assumptions; either corrosion, unanticipated wear or metal fatigue are the most likely possibilities. Or a ground anchor has failed.
A routine inspection regime should be capable of picking up >98% of these possibilities.
Or we may have had a bad resonance set up by so many users on the bridge inadvertently walking in synch for a few moments.
Or we cannot rule out deliberate damage to the bridge at this point.
All up - as most people have said - we need to wait for the engineering report. Hopefully it should be made available within months, not years.
