My bridge didn't survive the magnitude 9.0 earthquake on the San Andreas fault. I'm not surprised about that, though, since Warren Zevon has been telling me to for years that California is going to slide into the ocean. I apparently helped a digital version to speed up that slide a bit thanks to Bridge to Classroom, an engineering simulation in which you (or your students) can test various bridge designs (beam girder, steel arch, cantilever-truss, suspension, and cable-stay) with a mixture of safety features (bearings, ductile materials, shock absorbers, and shear links) against earthquakes of eight different magnitudes after learning a little bit about the challenges presented in the San Francisco Bay.
Here's to hoping they built the real one better than my beam-girder/suspension/bean-girder model did.
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