{"id":1482,"date":"2007-08-02T03:22:29","date_gmt":"2007-08-02T03:22:29","guid":{"rendered":"0"},"modified":"2007-08-02T15:11:30","modified_gmt":"2007-08-02T15:11:30","slug":"were_all_bridge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=1482","title":{"rendered":"We’re All Bridge And Tunnel People"},"content":{"rendered":"

See Update<\/b><\/p>\n

This is what not investing in infrastructure looks like:
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\nWhile I don’t know the exact cause of this specific disaster, I’ll suggest something that anyone who has owned a boat knows for a simple fact – when you skimp on maintenance and upkeep of the basic systems, they fail.<\/p>\n

In our case, we have one party – the Democrats – who want to spend the maintenance money on transfer payments and ridiculous pension plans for public employees. We have another – the Republicans – who want to give it away in corporate welfare. They both seem very good at giving it away to family, friends, and campaign donors.<\/p>\n

I wrote about it a while ago supporting “sewer socialism”<\/a>; both parties ought to be damn focused on fixing the systems and keeping the bridges, roads, and sewers working. If they aren’t, we need to change them until they are.<\/p>\n

Update:<\/b> The Minneapolis Star-Tribune<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The highway bridge that collapsed into the Mississippi River on Wednesday was rated as “structurally deficient” two years ago and possibly in need of replacement.
\n…<\/b>
\neanne Aamodt, a spokeswoman for the Minnesota Department of Transportation, said the department was aware of the 2005 assessment of the bridge. “We’ve seen it, and we are very familiar with it,” she said.<\/p>\n

\nAamodt said the department plans its bridge repairs using information from the Bridge Inventory database.<\/p>\n

\nMany other bridges nationwide carry the same designation that the I-35W bridge received, Aamodt said.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Politicians – well-meaning, honest, decent ones – killed those people by making bad decisions about priorities. We have a backlog of bad decisions about priorities built up, and if we don’t clear it out, we’ll wind up killing people until we get politicians who get it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sewer Socialism covers bridges too….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1482"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1482"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1482\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1482"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1482"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1482"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}