Thursday, August 02, 2007

Engineering disasters

I don't have much to add to the terrible bridge collapse in Minnesota other than to say that this is exactly why I'm semi-obsessed with the future tragedy that is Boston's Big Dig. Read this paragraph:

Minnesota officials were warned as early as 1990 that the bridge that collapsed into the Mississippi River was "structurally deficient," yet they relied on patchwork repairs and stepped-up inspections that unraveled amid a thunderous plunge of concrete and automobiles.
"Structurally deficient"? Check.
"Patchwork repairs"? Check.
"Plunge of concrete"? Check.

It may not happen within the next year or decade, but someday the Ted Williams tunnel is going to collapse and take hundreds of people with it.

Extra - My old Blogcritics review of "To Engineer is Human".

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

A tragedy courtesy of politicians who, in their own ways, follow Grover Norquist's dictum of reducing government until it's small enough to drown in the bathtub.

JorgXMcKie said...

Yep, that tiny, little $2.5B that Minnesota got to spend for 2004-2009 was just too little to fix the bridge. Wait a minute. You say that even though they've known the bridge had problems since 1990 and they've had around $10B to spend between then and now the problem is that government was *too small* to fix it? How frickin' big would it have to be? Or maybe IT'S TOO DAMN BIG TO GET MUCH DONE RIGHT!!