Video now on stuff http://www.stuff.co.nz/travel/travel-troubles/72853652/Lake-Waikaremoana-tramping-bridge-collapse-video-emerges
The Army bridge at Totara Flats wasn't too stable, either!
http://i1072.photobucket.com/albums/w378/TararuaHunter/img510_zpsnowkbire.jpg
http://i1072.photobucket.com/albums/w378/TararuaHunter/Totara%20Flats%20Army%20bridge%201960s%20damaged%202.%20%20Noel%20Fraser%20collection_zpszjr0odzj.jpg
Used it once, next came back, bridge was laying in the river.
Victim of the extreme winds coming down the hector Gorge
that's why the current swingbridge moves so much. Wind caught the wood deck and flipped it.
Its predecessor, a NZFS cable way suffered the same, had to be replaced, kept getting damaged by the wind, including when people in it
A more stable/fixed Suspension type bridge may not survive, needs to give a bit in the wind. The NZFS swing bridges were designed with that in mind.
This post has been edited by the author on 9 October 2015 at 17:35.
The centre of gravity of those carrying packs appears to be well above the hand rails and above the support cables at the centre of the bridge.
@TararuaHunter: "Used it once, next came back, bridge was laying in the river. "
I don't suppose it could have fallen any further than that, though, could it? Surely the proximity of the ground was just the built-in redundancy?
interesting because i never saw any articles of interviews from the press with the people who fell of the bridge, this is the first i've seen of public comment from those people. did the local hospitality end up keeping them away from any press attempting to get hold of them?
This post has been edited by the author on 9 October 2015 at 18:17.
Maybe. Then (and still) from the way the story came out it seemed as if DOC and Tuhoe might have been shielding them from media, if only by making an effort to not pass on contact details if asked. Maybe they didn't want to speak to media too, which is fair enough, but not having any direct statements from people involved also seemed to help a potentially serious media event dissipate quite rapidly through lack of information. All we heard was "they're being well looked after", even though it now seems first-hand that they've been completely dissatisfied with how DOC ignored them after the accident.
I'm not trying to suggest a great safety conspiracy. Right now I trust DOC enough for other reasons to think that the investigation's been genuine, and if there was a strategic effort to suppress the story by communications staff then it might have just been because the DOC staff actually dealing with the problem wanted to concentrate on that without being bothered.
But given how potentially serious this seems, that shouldn't excuse the media from actually try to independently validate what DOC was feeding it. Media never indicated that they'd even been trying to track the people down, so maybe they were just disinterested. If there were real commitment then I find it amazing that nobody was even sent to the end of the road to actually look at the bridge, take photos and possibly get an independent assessment.
maybe there was an agreement that the iwi would take care of the hospitality side of things and DOC said ok and let the take over and they were comparing the iwi's response to DOC"s
Give me a 3 wire. Even better give me a 2
Stuff have a video clip of this as tourists fell off. http://www.stuff.co.nz/travel/travel-troubles/72853652/Lake-Waikaremoana-tramping-bridge-collapse-video-emerges
