Just months after its grand opening, China’s Hongqi Bridge partially collapsed in Sichuan — a catastrophic failure that experts are calling a design failure that “should never happen.”

The partial collapse of the newly opened Hongqi Bridge in southwestern Sichuan last week, has sent shockwaves through the global engineering community and ignited debates over the adequacy of geological assessments in infrastructure projects. With zero casualties reported due to human detection of issues a day prior, the Hongqi incident highlights the urgent need for rigorous safety measures in areas prone to landslides and seismic activity. As experts call for accountability, the collapse serves as a stark reminder of the unpredictable forces of nature and the potential risks of large-scale construction in vulnerable regions.

In his assessment of the incident, Casey Jones, a U.S.-based geotechnical engineer with 38 years of experience, pointed to a combination of factors for the failure of the approach span and a section of the bridge structure. These included improper geological assessment, excavation impacts, the potential seepage effects related to a massive nearby dam, and inadequate design considerations as the likely causes of the failure which he asserted “should never happen ever on a project, but particularly in just a handful of months following the opening of a major project like this.”

Emphasizing several issues related to the geological conditions at the bridge’s abutment, he continues:

“I think the cause of the failure here is likely to be due to unfavorable orientation of bedding planes in the rock mass at this abutment of the bridge. One of the important considerations for the alignment of a tunnel or a bridge or roadway is to account for whether rock units dip into the area of the structure or particularly where there’s excavation. You don’t want to remove support and have rock dipping into an area where you’ve essentially cut the toe off. There’s some discussion about whether the presence of the reservoir has caused seepage throughout these rock masses, perhaps lowering the strength of the rock, particularly at these bedding planes. That information hasn’t been clearly presented so far, but I could just tell you almost certainly that this is a design failure that probably did not account for the proper orientation of the bedding planes for this rock. And whether they had planned to do any stabilization efforts like rock bolts and that sort of thing is not clear at this point. But when you have such a massive failure like this, it just to me indicates an overall alignment problem relative to the rock mass in that region or in that area.”