Bridge failure is one of the worst infrastructural disasters. This paper investigates the risk of bridge infrastructures in the view of sustainable management. Statistics on bridge failures from 2009 to 2019 in China show that most of these failures are related to anthropic factors. The collapse of the Zijin Bridge on 14 June 2019 in Heyuan City of Guangdong Province, China is used as a case to perform detailed analysis. Superficially, bridge collapse is a technical problem rather than a management problem. However, the deep reason for this kind of bridge failure may be due to the lack of sustainable management. In order to verify this point of view, both fault tree analysis (FTA) and strategic environmental assessment (SEA) for the bridge failure and later impact on society are conducted. According to the FTA results, the failure of the arch foot is the direct trigger of the Zijin Bridge collapse. Since a lack of real-time monitoring, risk assessment and other management issues are potential factors causing bridge collapse, strategic environmental assessment (SEA) is used to investigate the management issues related to the economy, culture, human health and environmental sustainability in more depth. The low total SEA result shows poor project management and a high safety risk. Finally, the specific managerial measures are proposed to improve the sustainability of infrastructures.

In this study, we investigated the flooding accident that occurred on Metro Line 5 in the capital city of Zhengzhou, Henan Province, China. On 20 July 2021, owing to an extreme rainstorm, serious inundation occurred in the Wulongkou parking lot of Zhengzhou Metro Line 5 and its surrounding area. Flooding forced a train to stop during operation, resulting in 14 deaths. Based on our preliminary investigation and analysis of this accident, we designed three main control measures to reduce the occurrence of similar accidents and mitigate the impact of similar accidents in the future, given the increasing number of extreme storm weather events in recent years: (1) to conduct subway flood risk assessments and to establish an early warning system, involving real-time monitoring of meteorological information during subway operation and construction; (2) to improve subway flood control emergency plans and to establish a response mechanism for subway flooding; and (3) to strengthen safety awareness training to ensure the orderly evacuation of people after accidents.