The vile hate site Daily Kos had an in depth piece yesterday called 'Deferred Maintenance,' Tumbledown Bridges, and Bathtubs detailing the conditions that led to the collapse of Minnesota's 35W bridge and the compromised state of thousands of others across the nation.
As the American Society of Civil Engineers Infrastructure Report
Card 2005 points out, we're $1.6 trillion behind in infrastructure
investment. That, by the way, is the amount of tax cuts Mister Bush tried to get
passed in 2001, before he had the Global War on Terrorism™ with which to shape
his legacy. Congress "compromised" and gave him only $1.35 trillion, tax cuts
that writer Robert Freeman once labeled a "national form of insanity."
The latest on 35W can be found here, while the LA Times reports here on the span's "all-or-nothing" design:
MINNEAPOLIS — A house of cards is how some engineers describe the steel truss
system used on the Interstate 35W bridge that collapsed into the Mississippi
River, saying that almost any piece of the complex design that failed would have
brought down the entire span.
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