A hydraulic monitoring system on a bridge over the River Esino, Italy

One of the main causes of bridge failure is the local scour around bridge piers by river floods. This is the case of the Sciasciano Bridge (Province of Ancona, Italy). In 1990, this bridge partially collapsed during a flood of the River Esino. Today, the rebuilt bridge links two Loccioni Group buildings. A monitoring system that measures the river bed level in real time is being developed to manage the bridge during floods. An innovative device, called BLESS (Bed LEvel Seeking System), is being used to detect the level of the bed. The paper analyses and discusses the monitoring system; in spite of the relative short duration of the tests, it appears clear that the device works properly. However, the test is too short to allow conclusions to be drawn about one of the most critical issues for scour monitoring stations, that is, physical resistance to high stage events. © 2016, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.