New info, and looks like they have a fix ready that does not involve too much jostling:
According to the team, the probable cause of the fractures appears to be “the formation of cracks in the girder weld access [holes]” that were cut prior to the beams being placed into service. More specifically for the engineers in the room:
1. Initially, shallow (micro) surface cracks developed during thermal cutting of the weld access holes in the highly hardened and brittle martensitic surface layer [of the beams].
2. Thereafter, larger pop-in cracks formed in two of the four flanges, potentially during butt welding of the flange plates.
3. Black, tenacious, high temperature oxide was present on both the shallow surface cracks and the larger pop-in cracks, confirming that both crack types formed at elevated temperatures.
4. The fracture origins were located in the mid-thickness of the flange where low fracture toughness, as confirmed by CVN [(Charpy V-Notch)] toughness testing, provided little resistance to rapid, low-energy, brittle fracture.
5. CVN testing was performed on all flange samples at the top, ¼ depth, mid- thickness, ¾ depth, and bottom. ¼ depth CVN results were found to be consistent with the project specification and girder plate mill certifications.
6. Rapid, low-energy fracture of the flanges occurred as the girder was subjected to service loading on top of the normal residual stresses due to welded fabrication.
While further material testing and stress analyses are underway, and will be considered in the final root cause assessment due next month, it appears that the cracked flanges, which have maintained “sufficient capacity to support the building dead loads and occupancy loads,” can be fixed in place.
As proposed by Thornton Tomasetti, the existing surface around the compromised flanges could be ground to a smooth surface, after which bolted cover plates would be installed above and below, restoring the beams to their original design capacity.
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