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UPDATE
Here is an MSNBC article in which you can search the number of "deficient" bridges by state. h/t Terre
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/...
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Although we in Minnesota are all still in shock, and finishing our remaining phone calls from friends around the country checking to see if we were alright, and comparing stories with neighbors and friends about where we were when it happened and when was the last time we were on the bridge, we are also opening our eyes and minds to what caused this tragedy. Of course, as with many tragedies, there is not one particular cause to this, but a series of mis-steps, of people ignoring warning signs, of mistakes made, of budgets cut.
So today, in our Star Tribune newspaper, among the pages upon pages of photos and personal stories, there was an article by Nick Coleman, one of the contributing opinion journalists, who summed it up so perfectly and succinctly, of how this could possibly have happened, that I thought I would share. It's not the whole commentary, but I just thought this particular portion summed everything up so perfectly:
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 then a bridge falling, its concrete lanes pointing brokenly at the sky, its crumpled cars pointing down at the deep waters 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."
The full article is here:
http://www.startribune.com/...
So today, we all sit and nervously wait to hear who has been listed as dead, and who they will still be pulling from the water. Is it a neighbor, a college friend I haven't heard from in a few years, an acquaintance I knew "through the grapevine?" And I am among the thousands of us who calls myself lucky that I chose not to drive home on that bridge yesterday, nor anyone else that I knew or loved, and wonder exactly what we can do to prevent this from happening again.