This horrible Minnesota bridge collapse is reminding me a bit of the Katrina disaster, in that there were lots of warnings, but state officials chose watchful waiting and perennial patching.
This is a risky approach with structures that can fail catastrophically.
When a road has holes,
You can patch it.
But when a bridge falls,
You can't catch it.
That's so strange because I thought about that, too. In today's paper it was made mention that there are tens of thousands of bridges in the US with the same rating as the one that collapsed. It seems that we're not pumping enough money into infrastructure.
ReplyDeleteI fear you're right, that we need to be spending more money on maintenance!
ReplyDelete