See Update
This is what not investing in infrastructure looks like:
While 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.
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.
I wrote about it a while ago supporting “sewer socialism”; 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.
Update: The Minneapolis Star-Tribune:
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.
…
eanne 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.Aamodt said the department plans its bridge repairs using information from the Bridge Inventory database.
Many other bridges nationwide carry the same designation that the I-35W bridge received, Aamodt said.
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.
I have been checking in on the news channels thru the evening. This is truly a major tragedy. 50 cars in the river? At least 6 dead at last glimpse. The bridge appears to have been under construction perhaps repair.
We have a crumbling infrastructure througout the nation that needs serious attention. I think that we have become too fat and lazy to support the needed tax levys to repair it and improve it. We have become too fat and lazy to understand the sacrifices needed to do the right things in the country and the world. I watched it grow during my life from an idea to a reality to a crumbling reality. Kind of like what I see in our civic life.
I will remember the dead and injured in Minneapolis – St. Paul in my prayers tonight.
The Hobo
Hello. As someone who lurks here, and for good reasons, I’d like to hear if anyone else believes that we already have the tax money necessary to do infrastructure maintenance.
In my mind it actually boils down to mismanagement of funds at every level.
AL,
Could you please have the decency to wait at least a couple of days before you politicize this tragedy?
Thorley, permit me to share some non-political observations that you might still find inappropriate so soon after the deaths and injuries. I do grieve. And…
[ Note well: Some of my first reactions revealed to me a kind of presupposition that borders on accusable bigotry. I’ll ruminate on that and see how I can correct it. ]
Well, I lived in the Twin Cities for quite a spell. My shock includes my dismay that the (stereotypically) slightly dour Scandihoovian-Lutherans of that area would let something like this happen. They’re supposed to be the folks that make Volvo cars and Saab Viggen fighters, not the people who built the Silver Bridge, etc. Not yahoos. Methodical, dependable, salt-of-the-earth types.
What I’m startled by is how multiple inspections of that bridge in the last decade could (allegedly) find no problem. So now I wonder about “scotomas”: complacency, groupthink and (last on my list but up for grabs) intellectual dishonesty, or outright corruption. Like the behavior of NASA regarding Shuttle safety–twice (intellectual dishonesty there, at worst, it seems). Like the possibly-apocryphal stories of people replicating pipe x-rays during the construction of nuclear power plants, instead of actually x-raying entire runs of pipe. That one was a kind of cultivated anosognosia, probably, just more blatant than the NASA stuff: “Hell, Charlie, everybody knows all this pipe is from the same batch, ergo, fine — and we’re running behind schedule…”
But maybe it was a goof, or something subtle. I don’t know.
It hurts, in a small way compared to the loss experienced by those who died and their friends and relations; but I’m still feeling one poignant ache because I thought that “that sort of folk” wouldn’t let “that sort of thing” happen. I feel like my team (Western Civ?) let us down.
But it’s far from being all about me, and truly I don’t know what to make of it.
It’s a good thing that we built the Ketchikan bridge!
We’re rolling in money. Clearly: just ask those living in FEMA trailers…
Dear God, those poor people.
May the dead find their way to a just and everlasting reward, and my their friends and family be comforted as much as possible. May the lost be found swiftly, and the injured healed soon and well.
It’s incredible that the death toll is so low, and that speaks highly of the rescue workers.
The politicians will never save us from things like this, but firemen will.
_”So now I wonder about “scotomas”: complacency, groupthink and (last on my list but up for grabs) intellectual dishonesty, or outright corruption.”_
The problem is, we as human beings consider these things to be abjerations or defects in planning or execution. They are, in fact, the norm, and on the scale of anything like ‘the Nation’ are probably inevitable. We can mitigate to some extent, but at the end of the day, sometimes bridges collapse. Whats really amazing is how many dont.
Like Katrina’s levies, the I-35W bridge’s collapse is a direct result of the public service sectors unwillingness to do its basic job, which is to maintain the governmental infrastructure put in their charge.
In New Orleans local politicians were far too busy taking kickbacks, bribes, and spending public funds on themselves and their friends to pay attention to a levy system that was woefully inadequate, even with the Katrina disaster, it seems like our politicians still don’t get it.
The I-35W bridge disaster will be no different. Everyone will point fingers, no one will be held accountable, time will pass and people will forget.
Pointing this out is not “politicizing” the situation, blowing money on wealth transfers, corporate kickbacks, and wasted social programs are all acts of politicking to a base solely for the purpose of maintaining a seat in power.
I live in California, where our State government has for the last decade, taken the public funds meant for infrastructure repairs to our overburdened highways, and blown it primarily on social programs and illegal alien welfare. It’s only a matter of time before a disaster like this hits California, and I can assure you the death toll will be far higher.
Our political class will never learn this lesson, because we as a public refuse to hold them accountable. And those of us who point it out, are far too few to make a difference.
According to Better Roads, 21.9% interstate and state bridges are structurally deficient or functionaly obsolete.
Chart “here.”:http://betterroads.gcnpublishing.com/content/Issue-Story.45.0.html?&no_cache=1&tx_magissue_pi1%5BshowUid%5D=635
That link doesn’t go precisely where I wanted, but if you place your mouse on “Special Reports” and click “Bridge Inventory” you are there.
[ Addendum from Nort: try “this link.”:http://tinyurl.com/25djdz there’s a small scale map and a table “below the fold”… ]
We need more reliable bridges.
Japanese cars used to be very good for this. If they say you’ll need your hoses replaced at 60,000 miles, it’s very unlikely they’ll need replacing at 55,000 miles or 65,000 miles. You can pretty much depend on them to wear out around 60,000 miles. At least they had that reputation.
If we build bridges that were guaranteed to fail at 40 years, the governments wouldn’t have much excuse on the 41st year.
_AL said:
Politicians – well-meaning, honest, decent ones – killed those people by making bad decisions about priorities_
Just point this out, even if in 2005 they had decided to replace the bridge, the replacement wouldn’t of been opened in 2007, probably, unless it was fast-tracked or some special considerations made.
Say they decide in June 2005 to replace it, so MN DoT (equivalent of Caltrans here in CA) puts out a request for a design. They get bids for designs by October-December 2005, then 18+ months for designing the bridge (including plan-checking and revisions). So they could be awarding the construction contracts in mid 2007, to the contractor.
The contractor then have to go about procuring the materials, getting it shipped their, mobilizing equipment, etc. Say another 90 days to be read for construction (fall 2007).
Now if you are not familiar with construction, its bloody hard to construct in Minnesota in the fall (snow/ice). So it would probably be planned for construction to bring in the following spring. Then figure 9+ months of construction (I’m guessing here).
Of course they would of temporarily reinforced the bridge if they were going to replace it, if they determined it was “that bad” that it needed replacement (or restrict traffic on it, ie no heavy loads). But since it is still early in the disaster, that would not be a guarentee of preventing this collapse.
From Popular Mechanics
This is spot on. Too bad no one seems to care.
At this time we have absolutely no idea why the bridge failed, none. All of the inferences about why the bridge failed are speculation.
And folks are launching into complaints about crumbling infrastructure and our unwillingness to tax ourselves to do public construction or alleged corruption or group-think of inspectors is all complete guesswork. Let’s let the accident investigators do their job before we flagelate ourselves over this.
Three comments:
1) Our lives are incredibly fragile. Those poor people were going about their daily lives when the bridge fell. Many of them had crossed that bridge dozens or hundreds of times before. It is doubtful that a single one of them seriously considered the possibility that the bridge might fall before they began crossing — and then it collapsed beneath them.
2) AL’s post on the neglect of infrastructure repair and enhancement by both our major political parties is spot on. It doesn’t matter whether they justify the tremendous spending required as enhancing our economic competitiveness, improving/maintaining our quality of life, enhancing our military power, enhancing our scientific research environment, or just generating a lot of quality jobs. They’re all valid reasons. Now our political leaders just need to pick some of them and prioritize infrastucture funding over entitlement spending and tax cuts.
3) Great quote by Gabriel from the article in Popular Mechanics. Infrastructure is a capital investment and we’ve been using it up instead of replacing it.
Infrastructure isn’t sexy. We’re all about the sexy these days. And default behavior / thinking is to believe once we’ve bought / got something it’ll be there forever unless somebody steals it. Paraphrasing someone above, what’s amazing is that most bridges _are_ still standing, given those human propensities.
Via “Voice of America”:http://voanews.com/english/2007-08-02-voa7.cfm
bq. The bridge was built in 1967, and was inspected in 2005 and 2006. No defects were detected in those inspections, but a report issued in 2005 by the federal government rated the bridge as “structurally deficient” and in possible need of replacement.”
bq. A 2001 report by Minnesota’s transportation department concluded the bridge would not have problems with “fatigue cracking” in the future, but it urged frequent inspections of the bridge trusses.
I’m weeping and speechless from looking at the picture at head of that VoA article. No warning. No chance.
We tax ourselves plenty, its how we spend those tax dollars that is the problem.
Tallied up thats 7.5 billion in wasted money that could have gone to infrastructure improvements. Lets also not ignore the massive boondoggle that is “bio fuels” mainly Ethanol, an unsustainable irresponsible gasoline replacement.
I don’t think anyone right now is blaming the inspectors, they are pointing fingers (rightfully so) at those in charge of the purse strings who should be spending our tax dollars to maintain and improve our infrastructure, not pissing it away on peanut storage or mythical flus.
To answer Sound from #2, of course we have the money to fix these things. We simply choose not to via our elected representatives.
A perfect example of this is the current debate about user fees for general aviation and the ATC system upgrades. I have been involved in aviation for just over 30 years. In all that time there has been continual discussion about the lack of the ability of the FAA to spend the Aviation Trust Fund money on modernizing ATC. Now we hear from the FAA that the ONLY way we can make the system work is through user fees. Never mind that GA has been paying it’s way through fuel taxes for 50 years and airline passengers have been paying through ticket taxes. (Airlines don’t pay fuel tax and the simply collect the ticket tax from their customers for the federal government.) And yet the DOT and FAA can’t seem to get their stuff in one sock and buy systems to make ATC work without multiple failures. The money is there, they just can’t seem to make a decision and manage the process. The bottom line, IMO, is that government does a pretty poor job at making capital budgeting and purchasing decisions.
It is the same scenario with the bridges, only on a different scale. We are the wealthiest nation on the face of the planet. We can fix these things, without additional taxes, if their is the political will. There is not. The amount spent on political earmarks could probably fix the problem. But there is no incentive (or disincentive) to shift the spending from dubious “research” for political patrons. It will continue on the same course until we collectively say enough. It is the natural course of things when people are put in charge of spending other peoples money with little or no accountability.
A little perspective- 115 Americans died in car crashes yesterday, statistically speaking. Every death is a tragedy, and every one was undoubtedly horrifying. I think these big media events happen to play into our insecurities, but the bottom line is the bridges and roads you travel over today are no more dangerous than they were yesterday when we didnt give it a second thought.
“Could you please have the decency to wait at least a couple of days before you politicize this tragedy?”
No. Because this was a political tragedy the moment it happened, and saying that doesn’t make it any less true. This wasn’t the result of a natural disaster. This wasn’t the result of something which is difficult to plan for. This wasn’t the result of an attack by enemies. This was nothing more than previously foreseen bureacratic mismanagement.
Politicizing a tragedy is wrong if and only if the political meme being spread is dishonest. For example, it is politicizing a tragedy to yell about gun control in the aftermath of shooting spree by a lunatic, because the gun isn’t the root cause, or at least it isn’t clear that it is the root cause. Or for even a better example, it is politicizing a tragedy to yell about restrictions on a certain class of guns when that class of guns wasn’t even involved in the affair you are talking about.
But where is the dishonesty here? Where is the nefarious motive? Does anyone disagree that American infrastructure is crumbling?
The popular mechanics article is spot on. And I’ll take it one further. When I studied history, one of the reoccuring themes we were supposed to take away from it is that great civilizations go through a cycle of building and collapse which occurs when a generation begins to spend the capital built up by the hard efforts of earlier generations. I keep repeating, that this country is due to collapse by around 2020. All the signs are there if you don’t refuse to see them. Anybody who doesn’t have thier heads in the sand can see them.
We began the downturn in the late ’60’s with the ‘counter-cultural’ culture of irresponcibility. If you look at what that culture was about in hindsight, it was about freeing itself from responcibility. It wasn’t about freedom, it was about freedom from consequences. It was about not growing up. It was about not having to assume an adult role. That culture more or less won the culture wars and took control of all the institutional and memetic high ground.
We can fix this without additional taxes. But it would involve changing the political culture. And the political culture has inertia. At this point, it can no more be stopped than you can stop a runaway semi by stepping in front of it. We are going to keep spending or money on fishes rather than fishing poles and sooner or later we are going to wake up and wonder where all the wealth went.
A bit of perspective from the second biggest Anglo-Saxon nation; it isn’t only American politicians that would rather spend money on bribing the voters than maintaining infrastructure.
The recent flooding in the English Midlands that has caused $3 billion worth of damage and claimed many lives was not caused by this, but it could have been made a lot less by keeping up the flood defenses; despite knowing that there already wasn’t enough money, funds have been cut in 5 successive years.
There was a story, quickly squashed, in the media about a small part of one of the worst-affected areas where half a dozen private individuals risked their necks to remove a manhole cover and poke around in the drain underneath with a long pole; after a few minutes, the water went down this drain like bathwater down a plughole and saved about a square mile from a flood. Conclusion; local authorities couldn’t even be bothered to clean out the drains, one of the most basic bits of infrastructure spending there is.
In my own home town, every time it rains the foot-deep puddles appear in the same old places; one, that I have given up reporting, has been there for twelve years to my knowledge. I pass the location evey day, and in the drain whose blockage is responsible there are tree saplings growing.
UK road taxes; only 20% of the money goes to the declared purpose. Thames Valley Water Authority; 30% of collected water goes in leakage, and there is a drought warning almost every summer, with water use restrictions.
The simple fact is that there are no votes in highway repair, water supply and sewers. Until the general public makes it otherwise, this won’t change, and neither will the crumbling infrastructure.
Unfortunately, in any democratic country, the voters get the government they deserve.
“…but the bottom line is the bridges and roads you travel over today are no more dangerous than they were yesterday when we didnt give it a second thought.”
I believe that that is my point.
The problem is that it was just as bad yesterday as it is today. The levy system in NO didn’t break when Hurricane Katrina showed up. It was broken years before that, and due to crumble hurricane or no hurricane. As far back as 1998 I advised people not to buy property in NO, because it was due to become a ghost town (also on that list, Phoenix.) On 9/13/2001 I posted about how lucky we were that the enemy was idiots who knew nothing about this country, because if they did they would have hit us were it would have hurt more. Certain people got really offended by that (remember we still thought 30,000 people had died), and asked, ‘Oh yeah, where could they have hurt us more?’ The NO levy system was one of the places I had in mind. In terms of life lost, Katrina may have been a good thing. That system could have failed when the city wasn’t evacuated. There are still alot of places that are just as bad if you know where to look.
FEMA didn’t suddenly become broken after Katrina, and the CIA didn’t suddenly become broken on 9/11.
The problem is that none of this will be addressed until its too late. The problem is exactly that no one is going to give this a second thought either. The problem is exactly that this will result in political band-aids, which are, like the whole ethanol scam or the whole Kyoto Protocal, exactly the opposite of what responcible and rational behavior would be. The safest bet is to bet that the society will seek to return to the status quo as soon as possible. Do you think that this latest tragedy is going to spark a new interest in investing in real social capital? You are going to be sorely disappointed.
“There was a story, quickly squashed, in the media about a small part of one of the worst-affected areas where half a dozen private individuals risked their necks to remove a manhole cover and poke around in the drain underneath with a long pole; after a few minutes, the water went down this drain like bathwater down a plughole and saved about a square mile from a flood. Conclusion; local authorities couldn’t even be bothered to clean out the drains, one of the most basic bits of infrastructure spending there is.”
I’ve got a great story along these lines. In the aftermath of Rita (the one after Katrina), the apartment complex were I was living was quartering alot of feds. There was some local flooding, so that several cars and apartments were already flooded, and several more in danger of going under. It was about 3AM, and many of the locals had when they became aware of the problem, gone outside to rescue vehicals from the rising waters and otherwise watch the unfolding disaster as water began to fill peoples homes. Now, I’d been living there for a while, and I knew the source of the problem. I said to several of the men standing around:
“There is a grate covering a storm drain out there where the water is deepest. It can’t be more than 3′-4′ deep there. That drain is plugged with branches that have washed into it after being blown down by Katrina. If we get some poles and shovels, we can probably open that drain enough to get the water to go down.”
About that time, one of the badged FEMA agents came out and began shouting at people, “Everyone get inside. There are leeches in the water. There are snakes in the water. There is glass in the water. You are going to get hurt. If you don’t get out of the water, I’m going to have you arrested.”
Now, I strongly suspected (having been an agent of the commerce department) that he lacked in authority to do so, but I wasn’t sure and didn’t feel like arguing. The crowd started dispersing, except for the poor souls in thier apartment doors standing in 1-4 inches of water or trying to sandbad thier front door. But I went to the agent and tried to explain to him, how we could solve the problem. No good. He yelled at me, and everyone else in the area.
Now, had we not been so ‘protected’, had the community existed in its natural state, I or someone else would have taken responcility for the problem and tried to fix it. But as it was, nothing happened except our ‘protectors’ threatened us with violence.
Many government expenditures to solve problems are actually worse than no expenditure at all.
_Tallied up thats 7.5 billion in wasted money that could have gone to infrastructure improvements._
What’s the opportunity cost on $600 billion+?
Donno; what the annual cost of a 9/11 event? Typically when you do a project impact review, you look at the “no project” impact as well…
A.L.
My point is that im not convinced there is anything we can do to stop a Katrina/bridge tragedy… yes, with perfect forsight we could do it, but i mean realistically.
NO is a perfect example. EVERYONE knew the dikes were broken. Every single year the nation held its breath when hurricane season rolled around and breathless reporters explained what would happen if one got near the city. But no-one fixed it. Why? Assumedly we live in a democracy and tend to get the governments we deserve (in the long run especially). If the people of NO were truly as concerned as they should have been, they would have seen the system fixed. If the rest of the nation really cared that much, it would have gotten fixed. By none of us did, rationally or irrationally. Regardless, that appears to be human nature.
My point is that Katrina and probably this bridge were black swans- so far out of everyday human experience that we are horrible at facing up to their odds or implications, and hence we are terribly at preventing them. This shouldnt be shocking. If it wasnt this bridge there are thousands of others. Or forget bridges, what about roads, or high rises, or floods, earthquakes, tornados, fires, mudslides… there are just too many things that statistically _are going_ to go wrong in a nation this size. To me its irrational to be shocked when they do happen.
This about what happens next. We’ve had maybe 50 years of ‘modern’ archecture and a handful of bridges collapse out of thousands- and this will be the one we remember. Now we will go out and reinspect every bridge in the nation and make a bunch of fixes that are probably marginal, thinking that we are accomplishing something. The odds of another bridge going down are impossible to know (though certainly quite long, historically speaking) because the odds of this one down we _still_ dont know. We just know it did go down. Im not entirely sure how different this is than sacrificing a ram to keep the drought away, when you get down to brass tacks.
Katrina was 100% predictable, we just couldn’t predict which year the hurricane would come. There were a variety of improvements in evacuation technique etc, scheduled for 2006 and later.
This bridge was not predictable, unless there was something wrong with the inspections. Well, there was something wrong with the inspections.
Next question — would the inspections have shown up the problems if they’d been done properly? If not, we need better inspections. If so, we need better inspectors.
Or maybe we need better materials. If we made our bridges out of glass, any crack under tension would propagate dramaticly. That’s one of the reasons we don’t make bridges out of glass. Reinforced concrete is not supposed to propagate flaws as much. Put the steel under tension and the concrete under compression, and if the concrete crunches a little it doesn’t propagate much. If that’s wrong — if our materials are being used in a way that doesn’t quite work — then we have a lot of work to do.
It could have been a statistical fluke. If we have 1000 bridges that size, and the chance is one in a million per year, and we just happened to have one this year, well it’s unlikely but unlikely things happen sometimes.
On the other hand, if 20% of the bridges are classed as structurally deficient, maybe it wasn’t one in a million per bridge that something like this would happen. It might be a lot more likely than that. And as they age the chance likely goes up.
So I guess the obvious solution is to notice how much money we have available to replace bridges, and we start with the worst of them. Is it worth replacing or is it better to get rid of it and not replace it? And we go up the list from the bottom.
Meanwhile we look at the ones that aren’t going to be replaced or destroyed soon. What chances should we take with them? Figure that losing 50 cars with maybe 75 people in them amounts to a cost of a hundred million dollars. (Not to put a cost on human life, but on average people aren’t likely to earn much over a million dollars in the rest of their lives.) It would be very inconventiont to close, say, 200 important bridges because there’s a small chance they’ll fall down this year. And yet if we don’t, maybe one or two of them will fall down. (Likely less than that this year, but the chance will keep growing as they age.) So at some point it becomes worth it to set up a system to limit the number of cars on those bridges at one time. If it’s only 30 cars on the bridge at one time, that’s only 60% the cost if it collapses. And maybe having fewer cars on the bridge at one time might have some slight reduction in risk of accidents, too.
So if you aren’t ready to close the bridge entirely, cutting down the traffic on it reduces the number of people at risk on it at one time. When you cross that bridge, maybe twice a day, you might get a little twinge of excitement in your otherwise-mundane day. There’s just a chance that today is the day, that it will fall while you’re on it.
And anyway we wouldn’t have to close that many bridges, because the 21% figure includes some bridges that are already closed.
_”Katrina was 100% predictable, we just couldn’t predict which year the hurricane would come. There were a variety of improvements in evacuation technique etc, scheduled for 2006 and later.”_
_”This bridge was not predictable, unless there was something wrong with the inspections. Well, there was something wrong with the inspections.”_
This is apples and oranges- Katrina was not predictable… ‘a hurricane’ was predictable. Not to be a smart ass, but if everyone knew ‘Katrina’ specifically, was going to be the culprit things would have been much different.
This bridge wasnt predictable, but ‘a bridge’ certainly was. Sooner or later.
Thats what im saying- a major California earthquake is entirely predictable, but when and where and how are not. Hence some of the most expensive property on earth is in California. We’re really bad at avoiding black swans, or at least acting as if we are aware of them rather than talking about them (economics being the best indication of what we really ‘believe’)
An interesting point I heard somewhere. An interviewer was asking questions of the interviewee. The interviewer made the statement that you can’t put a price on human life. The interviewee immediately objected that people do it on a daily basis. It is called life insurance!
It is the same choice the Corp of Engineers made with the levies in NO. They weighed the risk against the cost and came to what they thought was the best possible choice given the constraints of time and money. Maybe the bridge collapse was an avoidable tragedy, maybe it was simple a misjudgment. One thing is for certain. Some poor slob with all of the responsibility but none of the authority will take the fall.
Mark, I’m not sure what your point is.
California is demanding extreme construction techniques knowing that an earthquake will come. It’s predictable it will come in the lifetime of the buildings, so they have to meet code.
NO was in bad shape and they just hoped the hurricane wouldn’t come that year.
Bridge inspection is supposed to work. They’re supposed to be able to tell about problems. OK, it turns out they did know about problems with this bridge. To get the rating it had, there were three categories. Closed, light traffic only, or requires immediate fix. (There was a fourth category that’s harder to interpret.)
If this was “requires immediate fix” the latest inspection should have shown it. So now the question will be why that inspection didn’t do so.
You read the link? Around 20% of our bridges are rated as bad as this one. It costs a lot of money to fix up these bridges enough to get them off the list as fast as other bridges go on the list. We’re very slowly solving the problem by closing bridges and not replacing them. But that’s a slow, long-term solution. We’re finding cheaper ways to repair them, like putting steel-and-epoxy band-aids on them.
But it’s a great big problem. We built bridges in the ’60’s like we thought we’d be rich forever. Now that construction is falling apart and we don’t spend the money to replace it. We aren’t nearly as rich now as we were then, except in computer equipment where we’re far far richer.
I would be interested in the coming days to learn more about bridge inspections. It strikes me that a number of key features in a bridge are not necessarily visible, they are either covered with concrete, embedded in the ground or (not in this case) obscured by water. A crack may or may not be structurally significant. Being grown-ups entails some recognition about dealing with uncertainty.
Here, we seem to have some certainty. The bridge was designated “structurally deficient.” I’ve seen some governement officials explain this isn’t as bad as it seems, that it’s quite common. Per my link #11 (thanks Nort), “An SD bridge is one that (1) has been restricted to light vehicles only, (2) is closed, or (3) requires immediate rehabilitation to remain open.” This bridge was obviously not closed and I believe I saw non-light vehicles in the pictures, so it must have required immediate rehabilitation, no?
Is this common? The above link says that 21.9% of interstate and state bridges are structurally deficient *or functionaly obsolete.* “An FO bridge is one in which the deck geometry, load carrying capacity (comparison of the original design load to the State legal load), clearance, or approach roadway alignment no longer meets the usual criteria for the system of which it is an integral part.” This second group sounds indirectly serious, but not as serious as “structurally deficient.”
One other observation. Early today I attempted to find out what bridges in my state are designated “structurally deficient.” This database does not appear to be available online. Maybe that would be a starting point.
_”California is demanding extreme construction techniques knowing that an earthquake will come. It’s predictable it will come in the lifetime of the buildings, so they have to meet code.”_
The problem is they wont stand up to the earthquake they arent rated to stand up to, and that earthquake is going to happen some day.
This is _exactly_ the problem- we have a very false sense of security in general because we have all these regulations (dont get me wrong, on the everyday scale these regulations are very important, so the small ‘ordinary’ stuff doesnt know your building down). But where do all these regulations come from? Past experience of buildings and bridges falling over for the most part (or computer models which by definition test ‘expected’ circumstances). But the problem is we havent figured out all the ways to knock down a bridge (or a building, or have an earthquake)- not even close. We’ve examined data of, say 100 fairly ordinary years (at most) and we think we know something about bridges. The problem is we dont know anything about how statistically widget #X breaks under stress once every 500 years (or 5000, or 10,000) for either no reason we can fathom, or for reasons we can only understand in hindsight.
Same for natural disasters. We dont know enough about what continent splitting earthquakes are going to do to our buildings, even though we know ones coming someday. And we’ll have the balls to be surprised by it.
Or when the comet smacks the earth, or a million other possibilities (probabilities on timeframes long enough). We are extremely short sighted creatures, and we are particularly dopey about expecting things to always happen predictably when we know for a fact they wont, give enough time.
This kind of infrastructure failure by neglect has a long history and is deploreable. Here in California, the public employees unions have a stranglehold on infrastructure planning and maintenance. They have a dismal track record. Caltrans has good solid competent and hard working people working for it. It also has lazy incompetent and self serving slugs. As an organization Caltrans is braindead.
In 1989 the Loma Prieta Earthquake did $7.5 billion dollars damage and killed about 100 people.
http://www.johnmartin.com/earthquakes/eqpapers/00000079.htm
Caltrans had studies sitting on its collective desks for years and did not one damned thing to address the highly vulnerable elevated freeways, most notoriously, the Cypress, which failed catastrophically at 5 pm on a Tuesday whe the structure should have been a parking lot, but for the nearby World Series being played. It is a miracle only 47 died on the Cypress.
Caltrans Engineers Union members pointed fingers and played CYA masterfully. It was no one’s fault. It was the system. We don’t have enough engineers. But they had definite reports the older elevated structures would fail in an earthquake of 7.0. Caltrans refused to go to private engineering firms infinitely more competent and efficient and did nothing at a glacial pace.
FWIW, older truss bridges are vulnerable for many reasons. It is a truss section of the Bay Bridge that failed in the LP Quake. The suspension bridges rode out the quake with little damage. I am not going to cast blame for a collapse, the cause of which is still under investigation, but it is odd catastrophic failure would just sneak up, if it were properly inspected yearly and the competent engineer heeded.
And to bring this back to our bridge-
We are going to figure out what happened in all probability. And we are all going to cry woe that we should have seen this coming. But we didnt, and we probably never would have.
There are literally thousands and thousands of ‘potential’ disasters teetering on the edge of probability right now- and just as many reports and predictions hedging that they could happen. But we ignore most of them, and mostly they dont occur. Vastly most of them dont.
But one inevitably does sooner or later, we all say it was so obvious in hindsight. Think about it, there are thousands of other bridges, and tunnels, and buildings, and electrical networks, and water stations, and ships, and planes, and trains, ad naseum that are probably equally or even more likely to have failed catastrophically and we are going to continue to ignore all of the EXCEPT whatever went wrong with this bridge, which by the way is vastly unlikely to repeat itself.
The only thing certain is we will never see the next one coming. Until it comes, at which point it will be so obvious again.
Mark Buhner –
I’ve got an old saying that I think covers my response to your take on this…
“It’s amazing how often s**t happens to people who say ‘s**t happens’.”
You move the probability curve a substantial amount by doing some relatively straightforward stuff, regularly, rigorously. You model the ant, not the grasshopper.
It’s not like I do that perfectly in my own life, but I work at it, and I work damn hard to do it professionally.
A.L.
A.L., I agree completely. My problem with the way we approach this is that we vastly underappreciate the likelihood of unlikely events, and hence we end up misspending resources and/or not preparing for the real dinosaur killers.
Believe me, im not saying @#&% happens at all. Im saying we are going to spend a hundred billion dollars on bridges over the next few years. Some of it will be wisely spent, much of it wont. How much are we going to spend on asteroid detection? Or emergency preparedness for a supervolcano? Or hardening cockpits for the day a high altitude nuke is detonated over the Midwest? Or for the next Tsunami?
All these things are very predictable, and all many orders of magnatude more deadly to humanity. How many resources do we spend on them, and moreover how much hope do we have to EVER spend them when the people of NO wont even be bothered to shore up the levys they know dont work? Much less bridges that have the potential to fall down?
Mark B –
I’d be interested in what you thought of “this old post on risk”:http://www.windsofchange.net/archives/003110.php
A.L.
Very impressive AL, i’ll get to part 2 later tonight. I was arguing that we ignore the catastrophic risks while obsessing on the (also very infrequent but nearly certain) disasters that have already happened. But it works both ways- the everyday tragedies that add up are equally as ignored (except perhaps by the activists and idealogues).
Cell phone driving is a great example. Its entirely plausible that TODAY more people died in cell phone related accidents than we lost on that bridge. Meanwhile we are going to spend billions to inspect and repair our bridges, which may or may not be ‘likely’ to catastrophically fail (history indicates not) and very little on cell phones. It might well be possible to put hands free technology in every car in the country for what we are now going to reflexively spend on bridge repair (unless Congress was doling it out of course, probably a runway in Anchorage that will need a few of the billion to get the deal sealed).
Im not knocking bridge repair- im saying we are really lousy at allocating resources, and deciding to do it through a prism of hindsight is part of the reason we got where we are to begin with.
AL –
We managed to build this infrastructure over a number of years -the question is maintaining it.
I understand we need the will to do this (and anything else for that matter), but money is also an issue.
What was the tax rate (combined federal, state and local) during the 1950’s and 1960’s when the Interstate Highway program was rolling, and what is it today?
I tend to think we are already taxed rather enough to do this stuff, and that the disposible income after taxes (and a mortgage) today is much less then it was for my parents, but I honestly don’t know.
A good way to fix this would be to hand no-bid contracts to a construction corporation formerly headed by a major politician. After all, it worked with the reconstruction of Iraq and New Orleans. Might I suggest Halliburton?
Re: #25 from celebrim…
That’s a very instructive story and I’ll remember it, but I don’t know that it’s relevant.
We don’t know why the bridge fell down.
It’s not enough only to spend money on preventative maintenance of infrastructure, it has to be spent in the right places at the right times. This implies regular inspections, which should also identify urgent problems.
In this case the inspections were done, and we know now that the bridge was such an urgent problem it should have been closed, but that is not what happened.
Was the inspection negligent? Were the rules the inspectors followed incorrect? Was the report satisfactory in itself, but the follow-though less urgent than the report required? We don’t know.
Therefore I think it’s the right time for prayers but not yet the right time to draw conclusions about preventative maintenance of the infrastructure. We don’t know what lessons may seem relevant when we have the facts.
#42 (Will):
Brilliant snark–not. Is it the best you’ve got? If so, wait ’til it’s on-topic, won’t you? Thanks.
A.L #27: “Donno; what the annual cost of a 9/11 event? Typically when you do a project impact review, you look at the “no project” impact as well…
A.L.”
Relevancy of your reply?????
I don’t get it. I thought the question of opportunity cost of $600 billion+ provided good perspective.
Unless you’re saying invading and occupying Iraq somehow prevents another 9/11 and I really don’t see the logic there at all. What is the connection?
I mean we can prove that $600 billion would fix a lot of homeland infrastructure.
We cannot prove that $600 billion spent in Iraq will do much of anything to prevent another 9/11. Why would it?
As an expatriate Minnesotan, I follow Minnesota news with interest and I seem to recall that the state dipped into their transportation funds to pay for a light rail system. This is significant because fuel taxes were imposed to pay for highway/airport construction/maintenance. There are matching federal funds for highway construction/maintenance but the important part is that the state has to pony up part of the overall cost. I have nothing against light rail but Minnesota is going to look pretty stupid if it comes out that they undercut highway maintenance to fund it.
Avedis, I think you got it. The theory is that occupying iraq is preventing another 9/11.
I have a theory that explains why it might be true. It goes like this: Napoleon had a maxim that went, “Never distract your enemy while he is making a mistake.”. See, if you get his attention on something else he might accidentally stop making the mistake. And so if we are doing what Bin Ladin etc want by occupying iraq and inflaming muslim opinion, he would hesitate to do another attack on the USA which might get us to divert resources from that mistake.
It would follow that if we pull out of iraq, AQ might stage another big terrorist action in the USA to try to get us to make another similar mistake.
A lot of the costs of our occupation are hidden. Benefits to soldiers that aren’t budgeted yet. Replacing equipment early, that hasn’t been budgeted yet. Funds reallocated from other things, maintenance etc that go to iraq instead of their normal use, that we’ll have to play catch-up with later. Damage caused by deferred maintenance. Etc. But I tend to doubt that the war is costing us $600 billion a year. Maybe $400 billion. Officially isn’t it only a third of that? And it’s underfunded and might require another round of funding this year. And maybe the same amount of hidden costs. I could see $400 billion this year a lot easier than $600 billion.
But like Proxmire used to say, a bilion here, a billion there, after awhile you’re talking about real money.
The System Was Blinking Red . . .
bq. _A construction industry official who met with MnDOT about shortcomings on the I-35W bridge told the Star Tribune that there have been ongoing concerns among some MnDOT employees about the safety of this and other similar bridges._
bq. _”There were people over there that were deathly afraid that this kind of tragedy was going to be visited on us,” the industry official said. “There were people in the department that were screaming to have these replaced.” MnDOT has been trying to move these ‘fracture critical’ bridges up in their [budget] sequencing so something like this wouldn’t happen,” the source said._
“Star Tribune”:http://www.startribune.com/10204/story/1339411.html
(nice graphic too)
No engineer, public official, or politician would keep a bridge open that is unsafe. The bridge would either be posted with a weight limit or closed. This is an engineering decision, not a funding decision.
I agree that infrastructure is not funded enough. But a lack of funding did not kill these people. We don’t go around replacing bridges just because they are old.
_”More Than 70,000 Bridges Rated Deficient_
_Email this Story_
_Aug 3, 3:31 AM (ET)_
_By H. JOSEF HEBERT and SHARON THEIMER_
_WASHINGTON (AP) – More than 70,000 bridges across the country are rated structurally deficient like the span that collapsed in Minneapolis, and engineers estimate repairing them all would take at least a generation and cost more than $188 billion._
_That works out to at least $9.4 billion a year over 20 years, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers._
_The bridges carry an average of more than 300 million vehicles a day._
_It is unclear how many of the spans pose actual safety risks_”
Like I said, this could have been one any number of thousands of potential disasters. Maybe were justified in spending 50 billion dollars on bridge inspection and renovation, maybe not. But _we are going to_ because a big one collapsed on television- regardless of if there are ways to spend that money that would save far more lives.
Celebrim (#25), sounds like somebody needed to perform a citizen’s arrest on the FEMA dude.
Nortius (#44), it’s certainly not brilliant, but it’s also un-ironic in a sense I’m sure the writer did not intend: which CA earthquake was it where they waived the usual procurement rules and got things repaired in record time?
AL (#39), my take on that “Risk” series of yours is that I liked it better when you had more time to write! Back off on the workload, ok???? 🙂
Mark B, I would be interested in knowing where the engineers get those figures. Like what would it mean in this instance?
AFAIK Minnesota was told to make renovations immediately in 2005, it decided to spend some money (additional inspections and outside consultants) to put them off to 2008. So arguably we have the time-value of money, but that is probably not a meaningful concept to apply to government. The true cost to government is in making various public policy decisions more difficult (program cuts, tax increases or delay new programs). I might also speculate that delayed maintenance can increase expenses as construction costs rise or as structures deteriorate. My point is that financial cost between 2005 and 2008 might well be negligible.
One other comment, the Better Roads link indicates that over half of the problem bridges are city, county, and township bridges. I’m not sure that I care about these. The risks, the threats and the harm appear quite different.
#52 Kirk – thank you… Now if you’ll just take care of #2 son’s UCSD costs, I promise that I’ll have more time to write!!
Seriously, I miss it a lot, and once this silly summer is over, I think I’ll have some more time. And thank you again for the compliment.
A.L.
#51 Kirk Parker,
I believe you are thinking of the Northridge quake. The same “fastracking” is being employed to replace a section @ the east Bay Bridge approaches that collapsed in a fire. If the various DOTs are left to lead the parade, the next ice age will be here before anything is accomplished.
#48 PD Shaw,
This is par for the course. The defects described were screaming danger:
1)highly corroded pin connectors at the truss span ends.
2)stress cracks in main steel truss members.
I don’t want to turn this into an engineering thread, but if this is not a red flag, nothing is.
#50 Mark Buehner,
Accidents and natural disasters happen. Floods and hurricanes and earthquakes happen; engineers design to a standard that fits design criteria, which cannot met all eventualities. California has a 7.0 earthquake about every 18 years on average. Seismic design has come a long way. The dinosaur bureaucracies that are the state DOTs have not.
The New Orleans flood control projects were systematically looted by the corrupt local politicians and design standards shortchanged. Bridge funds were looted from the collapsed bridge and apparently competent experts professional advice ignored. Caltrans ignored jacketing the older elevated freeway columns until Loma Prieta and then ran around like chickens doing the seismic retofits on everything that didn’t either fall down, or have to be demolished. Caltrans did everything in its power to keep private engineering firms out of their empire, no matter the public welfare or safety. The politicians had looted the highway funds to buy votes. Yes, it is worth $50 billion for bridge inspection and $200 million to repair bridges.
FWIW, there is a huge difference between being obsolete and structurally dangerous. Perhaps the pols should be put in the hotseat to sort out the time bombs from the antiques. I would privatize as much DOT work as possible. Diversion of funds should be criminalised in the public sector as it is in the private.
AL,
My youngest (#4) is about to start his sophomore year, so I while I can definitely feel your pain, I can’t help much! 🙂
Kirk – at UCSD? Email me…
A.L.
avedis:
Good point about the $600,000,000,000. (I thought that writing it out in full might make the point better.)
A tenth of that would have gone a very long way towards shutting off terrorist financing permanently, by making oil just about completely irrelevant; it would at the same time, and in exactly the same way, have gone a long way towards making the future of humanity a lot safer and more comfortable generally.
However, the military got to spend the money, instead of on space infrastructure (which is the only real hope for the long-range future of mankind) on making lots of holes in Iraq and killing half a million people in the process. Oh, and on getting Shrub re-elected, despite the fact that he has approximately the intelligence of his namesake.
The War on Terror could, and in my humble opinion should, have been over in an afternoon, with zero Allied casualties; and who the heck cares about enemy ones? I certainly don’t.
Well-meaning, honest, decent politicians? What planet are you from?
andrewdb, where were you when the conservatives, especially Reagan, told us how overtaxed we were in the 1950s and 1960s when this infrastructure was built? (I might add that much of the expansion of the University of California and other great state universities dates from that period.)
The top income tax bracket even after the Kennedy Tax cut was 70 percent. Now it’s about half that.
I haven’t found information on California state tax, and I’m not in California right now so I can’t check the library.
Talking about an infrastructure disaster without mentioning the influence of the free-ride tax-cut movement is like discussing the AIDS disaster without mentioning the influence of unprotected anal sex.
AL,
No, he’s at the north end of the same coast, though (UPS).
“A tenth of that would have gone a very long way towards shutting off terrorist financing permanently, by making oil just about completely irrelevant…”
Someone is smoking crack.
“However, the military got to spend the money, instead of on space infrastructure (which is the only real hope for the long-range future of mankind)…”
I’m as big of a fan of space exploration as you will find, but having studied the physics involved and thought about it quite a bit, I must conclude that building space infrastructure is the same sort of investment in your future as having children. Building space infrastructure will reap an enormous benefit for that portion of humanity that goes into space, but those left behind will have as a reward mostly only the satisfaction of having done so (well, that and possibly protection from an asteroid cratering one of your continents). The gravity well just makes commerce between space and the bottom of the well to expensive to ever payback the investment.
“Oh, and on getting Shrub re-elected, despite the fact that he has approximately the intelligence of his namesake.”
It seems to me that this President was reelected in spite of the War in Iraq, rather than because of it. Given the strong economic recovery, the high approval rating he enjoyed prior to the Iraq War (or in the aftermath of its early victories), there is no reason to think that he wouldn’t have won in a landslide had there not been an unpopular war to discuss.
“The War on Terror could, and in my humble opinion should, have been over in an afternoon, with zero Allied casualties; and who the heck cares about enemy ones? I certainly don’t.”
Well, that is something that separates you from me.
The tense here is wrong; the freeway was re-opened weeks ahead of schedule. (The contractor received a large bonus.)
Celebrim:
Radiated energy (e.g. microwaves) gets up and down a gravity well just fine.
The point is that the required space infrastructure can be built with a relatively small lift to LEO and beyond, probably including a lift to the Moon. A lot of the required mass is fuel and structural members, which have a much less stringent safety requirement than delicate machinery or people. (Who cares if you lose one in a hundred loads of propellant?) This means that the lift can be cheaper, because inspection requirements are lower.
Reaction mass for getting around in vacuum can be just about anything, including the semi-useless silicate slag from refining.
So with a relatively small seed investment on the Moon and in Earth orbit (probably about a 2000-mile one), major-scale industrial machinery, including solar power plants and microwave transmitters, can be built, and then lifted to geostationary by methods that don’t involve use of fuels that have to be lofted from Earth. Incidentally, solar power plants can be ones that don’t need ultrapure silicon; a good old-fashioned mirror and steam boiler system will do.
Hell, Gerard O’Neill said all this thirty-odd years ago!
And then there is a large, and growing, supply of energy in the form of electricity, which can be used to make just about any fuel you want, including ones suitable for automotive use.
As for it not being much different on Earth for those left behind; well, sure – apart of course for lower pollution and less money given to terrorists. But isn’t the long-term future and safety of humanity more important? It is quite possible that Earth-dwelling humans will be a microscopic fraction of the human race, in a few hundred years.
There is material and energy for quadrillions. All we have to do is go get it; and instead of spending treasure and lives on that, humanity (in the shape of America) is spending them on blowing holes in a desert. Brilliant.
Get the SPS units and ground receivers built, and then lay a minefield in the entrance to the Persian Gulf; that’s what needs doing. It won’t get done.
Andrew j. Lazarus,
“The tense here is wrong; the freeway was re-opened weeks ahead of schedule. (The contractor received a large bonus.)”
I do not understand why the tense is wrong. CC Meyers did the Northridge work under an incentive contract with crushing penalties for nonperformance in the time stipulated. The same thing is being done at the east Bay Bridge site. Both contracts require Caltrans get off its beaureaucratic arse and let the contractor work with a minimum of interference.
A safety engineer being interviewed live almost choked when read an ’05 report that detailed stress cracking in the support trusses and diaphragm.
“Hell, Gerard O’Neill said all this thirty-odd years ago!”
And he was wrong then.
I’ve never seen a reasonable engineering feasibility study which suggested that the value of the power produced by a SPS over the lifetime of the satellite would be greater than the cost of producing the satellite.
The only thing you are likely correct about is ‘it won’t get done’. Much like the 100mpg car that runs only on water, the reason SPSs don’t exist is not because of a corporate conspiracy to supress the technology. The reason we aren’t building SPSs is that can’t.
To a certain extent, attempting to build viable SPSs might possibly be a good thing, but only in the way that the .com bust or the fiber optic bust was a good thing. It’s concievable that such a project would jump start space infrastructure enough that it would begin to become self-sustaining (but at this juncture even the probablity of that is low), but as a means of producing economical power I’m quite certain that it would fail at this time or at any time in the foreseeable future.
But, go ahead, feel free to convince me. If I see a build plan for a working SPS that is less optimistic than the most optimistic appraisal of the outcome of the Iraq war, or which isn’t filled with with as much conspiracy theory quackery as ‘Loose Change’, or which isn’t filled with quasi-religious Nikolai Tesla mysticism, then maybe I’ll be convinced.
Lifetime of the satellite?
Can anyone tell me why the lifetime of a satellite, especially a big chunky one, should be limited at all?
No corrosion, no stresses to speak of…
Of course, it would need spare parts, updates and reaction mass to keep it in place. Or, in the case of the last part, maybe not – using some of the power to keep station, using the Earth’s magnetic field as “reaction mass”. Movable solar sails would be feasible, too.
The microwave emitters are incredibly old tech – cavity magnetrons – and once again no upkeep; if you need a vacuum for upkeep that shouldn’t be a problem!
Space structures, once up, ought to be just about eternal given minimal maintenance.
Even with our corrosive atmosphere trying to eat it and our heavy gravity trying to pull it down, how long is the Eiffel Tower going to last? How long have the Pyramids already lasted?
Just because Western civilisation builds disposable junk, it doesn’t mean it has to.
Space is an enormously stressful environment, it is not “stress free”. Stress from thermal cycling alone is very significant. Vacuum has a damaging effect on components. Depending upon the altitude, various radiations are damaging as well. Another life span issue is with reaction mass for controlling attitude.
Apart from things already mentioned, near Earth, at least, there’s monatomic oxygen that will degrade solar panels, etc. There’s microparticle damage. There’s (was this mentioned already?) outgassing of volatiles causing accelerated brittleness in cable insulation, etc.
I think Celebrim’s point is that until you have *really* cheap access to space materials and *really* cheap space manufacturing & maintenance (not just bolting stuff together) it’s a nonstarter, and getting those capabilities has been harder than O’Neill and the L5ers hoped/thought it would be. Using Earth materials at anything like today’s launch costs is clearly not economical. 20-odd years on, there are still nothing like the right societal-economic conditions.
These comments are of course modulo the whole “what will manufacturing look like in x years?” question. If we get Santa Claus machines and decent design-ahead, everything changes. But everything changes even before that. Particularly since there are a lot of people with reason to believe that Santa Claus machines are “bad, mmmmkay?”
Keep pushing for it. At some point, someone will claim the notion as their own and go for it. It might wind up like Iridium or all that dark fiber; it might not.
“Lifetime of the satellite?
Can anyone tell me why the lifetime of a satellite, especially a big chunky one, should be limited at all?
No corrosion, no stresses to speak of…”
You didn’t make it very far at all in to your design study before one could tell that you didn’t know what you are talking about.
I’d go into the details, but mostly I’d be repeating the comments above. The point is, you put that stuff in space and you are going to be paying its replacement cost every 20-25 years. The smaller the scale of the reciever, the less efficiently it works, which means that to get a most efficient power transmission, you have to think on the scale of things we’ve never built on the ground much less in space.
You think we could do that for $60 billion? Do you have any idea how much for example what’s basically a study project like the ISS costs? Now magnify that by a factor of between a 1000 and 10,000, and you’ve got a reasonable estimate on what a start up SPS project would cost.
My uncle was a state highway engineer and made sure I understood the failings of the original interstate highway system. First & foremost, the highway system was never intended to become the primary transportation system. Rail & water transport was expected to continue carrying the bulk of passenger & freight traffic. Highway engineers underestimated the weight & speed of upcoming automobiles & trucks. They over-estimated the durability of their construction. Finally, much of the concrete was simply sub-standard. This is why our Interstate highway system is crumbling so quickly.
Unfortunately, these documented failures have little to do with why the 1-35W bridge fell in Minneapolis. As incredible as it sounds, the bridge design was non-redundant. One significant failure means the whole thing falls down. I could understand this if it were a 2 lane bridge over a creek somewhere but a 1,900 foot long bridge with the deck over a 100 feet above the water, carrying up to 2,000,000 people a day is inexcusable.
Worse yet, the Minnesota Department Of Transportation (MNDOT) has known since 1990 that this bridge was problematic & they fully intended to replace it in 2025 or maybe 2030. Why so long? Well, everyone knows that automobiles are evil so MNDOT spent $600 million originally earmarked for airport/highway construction/maintenance to build a 17 mile long light rail system that runs from the Mall of America to downtown Minneapolis. This severely affected MNDOT’s ability to repair/replace highways in a timely manner so 28,000 people a day can ride a train. This ridership is equal to about 30 minutes traffic on the now collapsed I-35W bridge.
One might conclude these people died for political correctness or to save the environment. Of course, plain old political corruption might be the better explanation. As Bob Woodward enjoined, “Follow the money.”
Jerry in Detroit: Good info. Thanks.
Minneapolis bridge collapse: design failure (link).