A video surfaced on social media showing a bridge beam under construction tilting to one side at a work site in the Dehkanabad district of Kashkadarya province.
According to a statement from Uzbekistan's Automobile Roads Committee, the incident occurred on August 6 during construction and installation work on a project to reconstruct a 60-kilometer stretch — between kilometers 1,255 and 1,315 — of the M-39 Almaty–Bishkek–Tashkent–Shakhrisabz–Termez highway, which is being carried out with backing from the Islamic Development Bank and the OPEC Fund for International Development.
The committee said that as crews were installing beams on a new two-level interchange structure, one side of the crane was raised before the other, placing excessive load on the opposite end of the beam. The beam then cracked and collapsed.
"A bridge beam — particularly a pre-stressed concrete one — can fail during assembly because the load conditions it encounters can differ entirely from the ones it was designed for. Beams are generally engineered to bear their own weight along a vertical axis. This was also confirmed by the project's construction supervision consultant," the committee said in its statement.
No injuries were reported as a result of the incident. Specialists from Temelsu International Engineering Services Inc., the project's engineering consultant, have now begun investigating the cause of the collapse.
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