ABSTRACT
Several of these latter units, which carried heavy traffic, were found to have cracked a few years after they were put in service, showing a repetitive character in damage. Lately similar cracks have also been discovered in the deck of a motorway bridge built in 1966. In both cases cracks occurred (1) at the rib-to-deck plate junction and (2) at the rib-tofloor beam junction, just in the zones where the wheels of trucks pass, which made people wonder about the reliability of some construction details of such structures.
