China braces for Typhoon Muifa

Typhoon Muifa was still a day from landfall but was already impacting China Sunday, officials said.

Shanghai closed two major sea bridges as wind gusts buffeted the region, Xinhua reported.

Authorities also imposed speed limits on highways and were conducting safety inspections of transportation infrastructure, the state-run news agency said.

The National Meteorological Center said the storm was moving northward off the east China coast and was expected to come ashore in Shandong province to the north of Shanghai Monday morning.

The center of the typhoon passed to the east of Shanghai but its winds were still strong enough to down billboards and briefly cut off power in some areas, Sang Baoliang, deputy head of Shanghai's flood control headquarters, said.

More than 310,000 people in Shanghai had been evacuated ahead of the storm, which is the ninth typhoon to hit China this year.

Maritime officials in Zhejiang province said late Saturday 35 fishing boats carrying 300 people, who had been reported missing off the coast of Shandong, had been found along the Zhejiang coast.

System could warn of bridge dangers

U.S. researchers say a new, affordable early warning system for the nation's aging bridges might avert bridge collapses that could result in loss of life.

A University of Maryland engineer says his inexpensive, wireless system could prevent the kind of bridge collapse that killed 13 people and injured 145 on a Minneapolis interstate bridge on Aug. 1, 2007, and do so at 1 percent of the cost of current wired systems.

"Potentially hundreds of lives could be saved," Mehdi Kalantari says. "One of every four U.S. highway bridges has known structural problems or exceeded its intended life-span. Most only get inspected once every one or two years. That's a bad mix."

Kalantari has developed tiny wireless sensors that monitor and transmit minute-by-minute data on a bridge's structural integrity that can be analyzed by a central computer to warn officials instantly of possible trouble, a UM release said Friday.

The sensors measure a number of indicators of a bridge's structural health -- including strain, vibration, flexibility and development of metal cracks.

"This new approach makes preventive maintenance affordable -- even at a time when budgets are tight," Kalantari says. "Officials will be able to catch problems early and will have weeks or month to fix a problem."