Eugene Robinson: A Catastrophic Failure

[babylonsister]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/02/AR2007080202026.html

A Catastrophic Failure

By Eugene Robinson
Friday, August 3, 2007; Page A15

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 big enough to swallow a tow truck?

It's easier to understand disasters if they have proximate causes -- terrorism, earthquakes, tornados. 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 yesterday, 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.

snip//

There are more than 160,000 "structurally deficient or functionally obsolete" bridges in the United States, according to the civil engineers' 2005 report. Of those deficient or obsolete bridges, 43,189 are in urban areas. There is no reason to think any particular one is about to collapse the way the bridge in Minneapolis did. But now we know that the theoretical possibility of sudden, catastrophic failure is real.

It's unrealistic to think this disaster is going to spur the nation to seriously address all its infrastructure problems. We'll talk about the issue for a while, then go out and buy another TV. But we can -- and should -- at least do a more rigorous inventory and identify the structures that pose the most peril. Yes, it's boring stuff to even think about. But just look at the alternative.

[Tanuki]

1. From the headline, I thought it was going to be a recap of the entire B*sh presidency. n/t

[acmavm]

2. So did I.

[sakabatou]

3. Thirded