Aftermath of Bridge Collapse

[Karl-G]

Perhaps it is understandable, but chaos seems to reign in Minneapolis in the aftermath of the bridge collapse on I 35 W. And that is not good nor safe.

 

While I can understand the desire to rebuild the bridge quickly, both for practical reasons and as a symbol of not being defeated, rushing such a project seems a very bad idea. This is going to be standing for a long time hopefully and it is going to be very heavily used. They do not even have a concept in mind, and yet they are planning construction. Yesterday, the media reported that there is discussion of a ten laned bridge rather than the current eight. There is discussion of whether the bridge should be solely for car traffic as it was, or whether they should plan on light rail or light bus capabilities. It takes time and discussion to arrive at a basic concept and then to plan what type of bridge (steel truss again?). If you don't even know what you want to build, how can you "get started right away?" Rushing such a huge and important and expensive project seems the wrong way to go.

 

Does anyone know anything about the head of the National Transportation Safety Board? Is he a Bush appointee? What is his competence? He seems way out of his depth and at a complete loss. After his first press conference, which he seems to like a lot, he appeared a buffoon. The impression has gotten worse. The day he arrived in Minneapolis, he gave a press conference in which he explained that the entire bridge would be reconstructed "at an undisclosed site downriver." Just as in the case of airplane accidents, they would put the whole thing back together again. (The impression he wanted to give seemed to me: we are extraordinary and we are going to do this task which no one else can do.) It seemed like a very strange thing to say. Two days later he gave an interview and without saying he was contradicting himself, he said they would not be reassembling the whole bridge; that was unnecessary, but they would be cutting parts out and then looking at those in great detail. (How can you tell what is important unless you can see the whole thing?) Two days later he gave another press conference, and without saying he was contradicting himself, he said they would be reassembling the entire bridge outdoors "at an undisclosed site downstream." There was no explanation of how it would be possible to cut the bridge into pieces and reassemble those, nor recognition that a bridge is not an airplane.

 

Yesterday, it was announced that they wanted all 88 vehicles left on the bridge in exactly the position they were when the collapse occurred. How can they clean up the rubble and open up the river if they do not remove the vehicles?

 

On the third day after the accident, he announced (I think there was a drumroll in the background), that the southern end of the bridge had shifted 50 feet (later it was 70 feet) to one side as it fell and no other part of the bridge had done this, and so they were concentrating on the southern end of the bridge. Three days later at a press conference, he announced that the shift in angle had no significance and they were looking at the northern end of the bridge.

 

Have there ever been such obsessive attempts at secrecy? 22 people have been arrested for trying to see the site. The Stone Arch Bridge was closed for several days to prevent people from trying to see the tragic site. (The best viewing apparently is from the Guthrie Theater "bridge" which cantilevers out towards the river and offers a close-up unobstructed view. But the Guthrie doesn't want people to use it.)

[KMEM]

I certainly agree with your concern of folks rushing around with the intention to "do" something ASAP, even if ill conceived and not thought through. It takes someone with real leadership qualities to get past this human characteristic. If I knew who and where that person was I would vote for him to be President.

 

The NTSB is charged with investigating any major transportation accident in the USA. Normally they are very deliberative and, in the case of aviation accidents, may take a year to publish their final report. Unfortunately the head of the NTSB is more of a politician and manager than investigator, regardless of who appoints him. However, they do have bona fide experts on staff with knowledge of any kind of problem leading to a transportation accident. After their investigation, they make their safety recommendations. In some cases those recommendations are just that, recommendations, and the authority that re-builds does not always have to follow those recommendations. The fact that the NTSB cannot just dictate their ideas to others does provide some checks and balance to the process. Sometimes their chief means of enforcement is by appearing in the various media which, in some cases, just appeals to the emotions of the public. Not necessarily a good way to fix a railroad.

 

That presently is how this system works, good and bad.

 

Best regards,

 

KMEM

[Guest zipperzone]

Perhaps when they say "starting right away" they are referring to the process of deciding what to build and where. It does not necessarily mean drawing up blueprints, buying steel and pouring concrete.

 

At least we can hope that is what they mean - or is Brownie do'n a heck of a job here too?

[+ Tom Isern]

From 8/2/07 Mpls Star Tribune

Nick Coleman: Public anger will follow our sorrow

Nick Coleman, Star Tribune

 

The cloud of dust above the Mississippi that rose after the Interstate 35W bridge collapsed Wednesday evening has dissipated. But there are other dark clouds still hanging over Minneapolis and Minnesota.

 

The fear of falling is a primal one, along with the fear of being trapped or of drowning.

 

Minneapolis suffered a perfect storm of nightmares Wednesday evening, as anyone who couldn't sleep last night can tell you. Including the parents who clench their jaws and tighten their hands on the wheel every time they drive a carload of strapped-in kids across a steep chasm or a rushing river. Don't panic, you tell yourself. The people in charge of this know what they are doing. They make sure that the bridges stay standing. And if there were a problem, they would tell us. Wouldn't they?

 

What if they didn't?

 

The death bridge was "structurally deficient," we now learn, and had a rating of just 50 percent, the threshold for replacement. But no one appears to have erred on the side of public safety. The errors were all the other way.

 

Would you drive your kids or let your spouse drive over a bridge that had a sign saying, "CAUTION: Fifty-Percent Bridge Ahead"?

 

No, you wouldn't. But there wasn't any warning on the Half Chance Bridge. There was nothing that told you that you might be sitting in your over-heated car, bumper to bumper, on a hot summer day, thinking of dinner with your wife or of going to see the Twins game or taking your kids for a walk to Dairy Queen later when, in a rumble and a roar, the world you knew would pancake into the river.

 

There isn't any bigger metaphor for a society in trouble than a bridge falling, its concrete lanes pointing brokenly at the sky, its crumpled cars pointing down at the deep water! s where people disappeared.

 

Only this isn't a metaphor.

 

The focus at the moment is on the lives lost and injured and the heroic efforts of rescuers and first-responders - good Samaritans and uniformed public servants. Minnesotans can be proud of themselves, and of their emergency workers who answered the call. But when you have a tragedy on this scale, it isn't just concrete and steel that has failed us.

 

So far, we are told that it wasn't terrorists or tornados that brought the bridge down. But those assurances are not reassuring.

 

They are troubling.

 

If it wasn't an act of God or the hand of hate, and it proves not to be just a lousy accident - a girder mistakenly cut, a train that hit a support - then we are left to conclude that it was worse than any of those things, because it was more mundane and more insidious: This death and destruction was the result of incompetence or indifference.

 

In a word, it was avoidable.

 

That means it should never have happened. And that means that public anger will follow our sorrow as sure as night descended on the missing.

 

For half a dozen years, the motto of state government and particularly that of Gov. Tim Pawlenty has been No New Taxes. It's been popular with a lot of voters and it has mostly prevailed. So much so that Pawlenty vetoed a 5-cent gas tax increase - the first in 20 years - last spring and millions were lost that might have gone to road repair. And yes, it would have fallen even if the gas tax had gone through, because we are years behind a dangerous curve when it comes to the replacement of infrastructure that everyone but wingnuts in coonskin caps agree is one of the basic duties of government.

 

I'm not just pointing fingers at Pawlenty. The outrage here is not partisan. It is general.

 

Both political parties have tried to govern on the cheap, and both have dithered and dallied and spent public wealth on stadiums! while scrimping on the basics.

 

How ironic is it that! Tonight 's scheduled groundbreaking for a new Twins ballpark has been postponed? Even the stadium barkers realize it is in poor taste to celebrate the spending of half a billion on ballparks when your bridges are falling down. Perhaps this is a sign of shame. If so, it is welcome. Shame is overdue.

 

At the federal level, the parsimony is worse, and so is the negligence. A trillion spent in Iraq, while schools crumble, there aren't enough cops on the street and bridges decay while our leaders cross their fingers and ignore the rising chances of disaster.

 

And now, one has fallen, to our great sorrow, and people died losing a gamble they didn't even know they had taken. They believed someone was guarding the bridge.

 

We need a new slogan and we needed it yesterday:

 

"No More Collapses."