"They are one of the defining images of earthquakes the world over, from Kobe in Japan to Oakland, California: bridges whose sections have slipped from their supports, crashing to earth like discarded playing cards. How much better if they could be held in place by cables that stretch during the quake and then pull them back into place when it's over.
That's the prospect held out this week by a team led by Reginald DesRoches, a civil engineer at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. DesRoches has demonstrated for the first time that anchoring the decks of bridges or highway overpasses with restraining cables made from "smart" shape memory alloys, rather than traditional steel cables, could help the structures survive quakes or hurricanes."
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