Interstate Bridge Collapses in Minn.

Originally Posted by SDW2001

I can only imagine the lawsuits here...people suing the government, the government suing contractors, people suing contractors directly.

Originally Posted by MsNly

People suing Apple because they saw everyone on the bridge with iPhones maxing out the wieght load; you know lawyers they'll come up with just about anything.

But seriously, bridges shouldn't just be up and falling down! Don'tcha think?

Originally Posted by sammi jo

Despite the "terror not suspected" statements, can we expect someone to blame Muslims for todays accident in the coming days ? Just one hint ... and Fox News and the rest of the gutterpress would be on it like maggots feasting on 4 week old dogmeat in 90ºF weather.

Originally Posted by sammi jo

Despite the "terror not suspected" statements, can we expect someone to blame Muslims for todays accident in the coming days ?

Originally Posted by sammi jo

The nation's infrastructure is in bad shape.... especially the ageing stuff. New York had a major event only last week with the failure of a high pressure steam pipe. We're spending $120 billion a year to further antagonize the Iraqi people, but the essential stuff back home gets overlooked. Perhaps "fixing the infrastructure" is regarded as "Commie talk" in DC?

Originally Posted by SDW2001

One doesn't think a goddamned interstate bridge is going to up and collapse for no reason.
They believe it was just some sort of structural failure as the bridge was being repaved and having new guard rails put on.

"...highways are deteriorating faster than the state can maintain them."

Originally Posted by sammi jo

We're spending $120 billion a year to further antagonize the Iraqi people, but the essential stuff back home gets overlooked.

Originally Posted by CosmoNut

I applaud your tenacity at trying desperately to bring EVERY subject back to the war.

Try this one: Black lab puppies.

I can pretty much assure you that if there is a technically honest and complete investigation, the ultimate explanation of the Minneapolis bridge failure will be related to fatigue cracking in the metal structure.

Already, news reports have revealed some prior observation of a fatigue problem with the bridge and that the bridge had a relatively low rating of four out of a possible nine, showing that it was structurally deficient.

The game played by virtually all government agencies is to find excuses for delaying the most costly repair or replacement of bridges and other parts of the physical infrastructure.

As another example, in most older urban areas there are constant repairs of busted underground water pipes. What is really needed, but avoided, is a total replacement of very old underground pipe systems – in many places 100 or more years old!

Government inspection programs have been terribly compromised over many years. The incredible political pressures to minimize spending on infrastructure have filtered down to the people, procedures and technologies used to examine bridges and other things.

Originally Posted by sammi jo

Exactly so. Modern structures shouldn't collapse like that without warning or reason...

The nation's infrastructure is in bad shape.... especially the ageing stuff. New York had a major event only last week with the failure of a high pressure steam pipe. We're spending $120 billion a year to further antagonize the Iraqi people, but the essential stuff back home gets overlooked. Perhaps "fixing the infrastructure" is regarded as "Commie talk" in DC?

Despite the "terror not suspected" statements, can we expect someone to blame Muslims for todays accident in the coming days ? Just one hint ... and Fox News and the rest of the gutterpress would be on it like maggots feasting on 4 week old dogmeat in 90ºF weather.

Originally Posted by SDW2001

A-fucking-men.

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.

By Nick Coleman, Star Tribune

Last update: August 02, 2007 1:06 PM
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 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."

Originally Posted by Ste

When I first heard the words "bridge", "Mississippi River", and "collapse", I immediately thought of the Huey P. Long, just outside of New Orleans:



Now THAT'S a disaster waiting to happen, right there. The lanes are so narrow it's scary just driving over it. But when a train comes overhead and the whole thing starts to shake ... oh, boy.

Originally Posted by @_@ Artman

Sammi jo is right though. I wholeheartedly agree. Our bridges are crumbling, our freeways are full of potholes, our schools are a mess, our health care system is a joke. Instead of spending 38 grand per second on our ability to kill people, how about we use a little of that money to fix our nation's aging infrastructure? The war was and is a gigantic mistake and a colossal waste of resources.

Originally Posted by Splinemodel

The cost of the war is insignificant in comparison to the amounts that are inefficiently allocated to failing social programs, which can only be classified as more gigantic mistakes and more colossal wastes of resources. At least the war seems to be showing some glimmer of promise after a leadership change. our social security, welfare, and medicare programs continue to fail, and have done so for decades.

Originally Posted by Frank777

As usual, Sammi's way off.

Even without the war, there has been a problem with infrastructure spending in North America, particularly in areas that are primarily run by the government.

The fact that that more and more of public dollars are being eaten up by "soft services", such as the bureaucracies built up to manage health care, education, welfare and other social services.

As a result, less and less dollars are available to fund "hard services" such as the building of roads and bridges. We've also seen that our electricity grid has failed to keep up with technology, water and sewer services are degrading fast and generating energy (whether clean or dirty) is mismanaged at best.

Unlike the war, nobody in the left or right was ever going to authorize the spending of trillions to fix all this. While I lean toward market-based competition solutions with government enforced oversight and compliance, it's hard to see how we take what we have now and get to the point where we have a thriving market-based solution for a lot of these needs.

In the meantime, cities like Minneapolis will continue to bury the victims of this foolishness.

Originally Posted by Footloose301

You've got to be kidding. No way would I put a train on that thing!

Originally Posted by @_@ Artman

Yeah, well keep building them nations and baseball stadiums. That'll solve all our problems.

Originally Posted by Splinemodel

I'm afraid I have a disability. I am unable to grasp the meaning of incoherent thoughts.

Originally Posted by SDW2001

The problem is government is trying to do everything it was NOT intended to do...like offer health insurance to all citizens, guaranteed retirement, spending on pork projects, etc...while ignoring what it should be doing: maintaining the infrastructure and providing conditions for basic law and order, defending national security, necessarily regulating, etc.

Originally Posted by dutch pear

Well, my government is doing ALL of the above (except the pork projects), and I am happy to pay a lot of taxes for that. Every citizen here is guaranteed of decent infrastructure AND access to decent healthcare AND a basic retirement plan.

Considering the current disaster, the New Orleans floods, the general state of US healthcare/health insurance as well as all the big-city poverty/crime issues, I am just really confused to exactly what you (among many) find wrong with this scenario especially in light of the fact your country is the richer one (per capita income-wise)

Originally Posted by MarcUK

Were watching the fall of the Roman Empire in our lifetime. Yay!

Originally Posted by Frank777

Don't you think you could reserve your stupid glee for another thread? They are still taking bodies out of the water.

Originally Posted by MarcUK

Im not cheering the death of the people.

But im terribly sorry if I actually dont care about them all that much. In other news (incase you missed it) pulling some guesstimated numbers off the top of my head, 100 people died in Iraq TODAY, 500 people died because of flooding in Asia TODAY. 1000 people died TODAY in Sudan, 5000 people died of malnutrition in the 3rd world TODAY.

Originally Posted by spindler

This is just ignorant. Americans and other countries have given billions to feed Africa but the problem is that most of it is lost to corrupt governments and roving gangs. We have attempted to solve the hunger problem in Africa. If you think that the military can't stabilize the roving gangs in Iraq, why would you think we could do better in Africa?

Americans have also attempted to help Iraqis even if in a foolish on not well thought out way. It is hard to imagine but it COULD HAVE turned out well in Iraq if the Iraqi politicians could have made some compromises with each other and Iraqis didn't support attacks on each other.

Is the U.S. responsible for the gangs that systematically rape and kill going around countries like the Sudan? You'll probably find some conspiracy theory as to why we are.

America may not be perfect but we have attempted to solve the above intractable problems. To blame it all on the U.S. and say "Nobody gives a fuck about them" is absurd.

Originally Posted by MarcUK

...pulling some guesstimated numbers off the top of my head, 100 people died in Iraq TODAY, 500 people died because of flooding in Asia TODAY. 1000 people died TODAY in Sudan, 5000 people died of malnutrition in the 3rd world TODAY.

So in context, did you spare a thought TODAY for the thousands of people who died becuase no-one gives a f--k about them? Probably not.

Originally Posted by Frank777

You're obviously confusing me with your ignorant self. I personally know people involved in relief work in all three causes you pulled out of your head.

It's important to remember that while self-obsessed astrology buffs try to score cheap points by claiming how concerned they are for the world's helpless, it's mostly the religious folks you deride who leave their homes and families, travel thousands of miles and risk life and limb to try to stop the hurting.