The article mentions this. Common engineering practice today is to avoid any single points of failure, but back when this was built, the profession was high on precision engineering based off modern finite element models and other ways to more exactly determine the capacity of a bridge.
It was deliberately built without redundancy, because they thought they could achieve perfection. In fact the models they used were correct -- it was the underlying assumptions about the long-term behaviour of the materials used that were wrong.
This isn't the first such collapse, and it likely won't be the last, but it's safe to say that engineers have learned from their failures. Modern standards generally maximize redundancy. Precision is used to reliably achieve a high margin of error, rather than to get away with the minimum possible.
It was deliberately built without redundancy, because they thought they could achieve perfection. In fact the models they used were correct -- it was the underlying assumptions about the long-term behaviour of the materials used that were wrong.
This isn't the first such collapse, and it likely won't be the last, but it's safe to say that engineers have learned from their failures. Modern standards generally maximize redundancy. Precision is used to reliably achieve a high margin of error, rather than to get away with the minimum possible.