Eugene Robinson: Back to Basics (infrastructure)

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From Truthdig:


Back to Basics


Posted on Aug 2, 2007
By Eugene Robinson

WASHINGTON—How can such things happen? How can it be possible that one minute you’re driving home from work, or riding in a school bus with your friends, or heading to a baseball game, and the next minute you’re plummeting toward the Mississippi River as the bridge you’re crossing suddenly collapses?

How, for that matter, can you be hurrying through Manhattan near Grand Central Station and suddenly a subterranean steam pipe explodes, sending a geyser hundreds of feet into the air and leaving a crater in the street big enough to swallow a tow truck?

It’s easier to understand disasters if they have proximate causes—terrorism, earthquakes, tornadoes. It’s much harder to get your mind around what happened during rush hour Wednesday evening in Minneapolis, when a busy downtown bridge across the river simply ... collapsed. As U.S. Transportation Secretary Mary Peters said at a news conference Thursday, in a pithy statement of the obvious, “Bridges in America should not fall down.”

They shouldn’t, but it’s quite possible that more of them will. We should also expect that more steam pipes will blow, that water mains will burst, that dams will develop worrisome cracks and that sooner or later, probably during a heat wave, much of the country will suffer a crippling blackout.

The heavily used Interstate 35W bridge that catastrophically failed, spilling dozens of cars into the Mississippi, had been rated just 50 out of 100 for structural integrity at its last inspection two years ago, according to the Associated Press. That wasn’t as much of a red flag as it seems in retrospect. Not for a moment did anyone believe there was any real danger of collapse, and the 40-year-old span wasn’t considered near the end of its useful life. The rating just meant that the bridge had structural deficiencies that at some point should be addressed—just like 27.1 percent of all the nation’s 590,750 bridges. .....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20070802_back_to_basics/