Posted on 05/30/2013 7:31:00 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
A section of the four-lane I-5 Bridge fell into the Skagit River in Washington State last week. Witnesses said it disappeared in a "big puff of dust." Fortunately, all motorists were spared - in contrast to the I-35W Mississippi River Bridge collapse in 2007 that killed 13 - although several were injured. This is in addition to the collapse of a highway overpass in Missouri early Saturday, which was caused by a train derailment.
The dated I-5 Bridge collapsed because a truck with a tall load struck an overhead steel girder, weakening it. The truck should not have been on the bridge. For a bridge built in 1955 with a vertical clearance of only 14.6 feet, the risk of oversized trucks accessing the bridge could have been reduced with additional infrastructure investment. Steel overhead gantries on both bridge approaches slightly lower than its maximum clearance, along with a series of height warning signs leading to the bridge, would have stopped overly high trucks from accessing the bridge.
This incident highlights a critical reason for utilizing public-private partnerships (PPPs) in managing the nation's bridges and tunnels. PPPs--standard operating procedure in many other countries--enable a private operating and engineering firm to assume the maintenance responsibility of a major infrastructure facility. Private partners operate under detailed, competitively bid, fixed-term contracts that lay out clear performance standards, with associated penalties and rewards depending on measurable outcomes. PPP contracts can, for example, specify the safety standards to which bridge and tunnel operation is subject, creating the high-powered incentives necessary to ensure the safety of motorist-customers using the bridge.
(Excerpt) Read more at realclearmarkets.com ...
When liberals are free to divert funds to support future (illegal) voters with medical care, free food, etc, etc, what do you expect?
Liberals are slime.
And should be treated as such.
This is just propaganda to hand tax dollars over to the labor unions.
No, unions shouldn’t collapse.
Bridge collapses are the fault of republicans, and the more the better.
In the world’s richest nation we shouldn’t divert highway funds to bike paths, rain gardens, and high speed fail.
Five years in, and green companies are going bankrupt, our schools suck, and our bridges are collapsing.
I begin to think that maybe his goals are not what they appear to be, and that they are not in our best interest ... [/s]
Response: True enough(assuming we are rich!). However, certain groups need free telephones, free food, free housing, free schooling and thus we do not have time or funds to care for bridges. Further, the article assumes there are people with the skill to insure bridges don't fall down. The latter, given the state of our colleges and their devotion not to competency but to equality makes the proposition that there are those competent to insure bridges don't fall down debatable.
No they shouldn’t but when you divert funds to desinated aggrieved parties instead of using them to maintain what was built to be used by everyone, these things happen....just a cost for being progressive.
Wouldn’t happen if you people woud stop beotching and pay more taxes.
/s
I don’t think we are the world’s richest nation any more.
And we not only give our ballooning welfare class these freebies, but illegal aliens who have no right to be in the USA get them, too.
What a country.
Since the liberals blamed the I-35 bridge collapse on Bush, shouldn’t they be blaming the I-5 bridge collapse on Obama???
Liberals said that bridge and infrastructure inspections, funds for maintenance, etc. had not been provided by Bush, so that the I-35 collapse was his fault. What has Obama done to cure these problems in his time in office, if liberals were so upset about bridge safety? Why are they now not howling that Obama shortchanged these bridge and infrastructure safety issues?????
This writer apparently has no clue about bridge engineering.
To start with, bridges have to be inherently fragile, because they must be lightweight. But this fragility is compensated for by using the stresses on parts of the bridge to make it stronger.
With such a design, you want the critical parts above the vehicles, where they will get little damage or stress, instead of below, where they will get frequent stress.
So this is how that bridge section failed, because of a truck with too high a load, hitting a critical overhead component.
Importantly, a safety feature did work, that each section of the bridge is independent from the others, structurally, so that if one section collapsed, it wouldn’t collapse the other sections.
Sure we are. Possibly not per capita, but in total amount of wealth it isn't even close.
Hope you are correct. But what about all that debt?
The libs steal the $ appropriated, then blame the GOP for being stingy louts. Libs have a great gig.
A lot of that stimulus money was supposed to go to infrastructure.
What happened to it?
A lot of it ended up at green companies that are now defunct.
If you insist on including the debt then the US is the poorest country that has ever existed.
In the World’s Richest Nation, Bridges Shouldn’t Collapse
The problem here is that every debt is somebody else’s asset.
I wonder sometimes if a useful way to compare fiscal health of societies would be the ratio between debt-based assets, and assets that exist in the real world.
But I don’t even vaguely resemble an economist, so I don’t know the right question to ask.
The headline is exactly correct but what happened to the billions ALREADY set aside for the repairs and shovel ready jobs?
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