Infrastructure plays a major role in the economy of
a country. Bridges are a major component of any
infrastructure and the failure of a bridge will affect the
economy of any country. The recent failure of the I-35W
Mississippi river bridge may be considered as a wake
up call to think about redundancy in structural design
of bridges, and evolution of bridge monitoring and
inspection systems. The details of the I-35W Mississippi
river bridge, its failure and its impact on future bridge
designs, monitoring and testing are discussed in this
paper. These details may help in preventing such
disastrous failures in future.