In inspections conducted in 2005 and 2006, the bridge received ratings. On a scale of one to nine, nine being perfectly safe, this bridge received a four. What does that mean?
That was the gist of a question by Jim Lehrer (NewsHour, PBS, 8/2/07) about the Bridge Too Broken in Minneapolis. The answer given on the program is not even at issue for me. What matters is that it is 2007 and the Bridge Too Broken (I35W Bridge, collapsed August 1, 2007) had been failing for TWO YEARS!!!
The Bridge Too Broken received failing grades as far back as 1990. It was rated for a 50 percent chance of catastrophic failure in 2005 and 2006. That's worse than Russian Roulette. At least if you're foolish enough to play that game, you've only got a 1 in 6 chance of blowing your own head off.
Now, if the bridge were a heart-lung machine, and received a rating that meant essentially sometime in the next months, there was a 50 percent chance of catastrophic failure, there would have been immediate action. If failure would result in patient death, the medical profession would have insisted the hospital where such a machine was located, would replace the machine. No medical roulette. Just a fix or replacement. Pronto.
If the Bridge Too Broken were a toy having a 50 percent chance, at one time or the other before repair of causing mayhem, or death to a child, the toy would be recalled. Perhaps millions of such toys.
If the Bridge Too Broken were a food, such as say hamburger, with even a 10 percent chance of infecting people eating that food with some serious disease, the food would be recalled. The machinery used in making that food would be replaced or repaired, and life would go on.
But it's a bridge. Repairs aren't flashy. In fact, if the bridge had been fixed, after spending millions or even a billion dollars, the result would have been a bridge that looked essentially the same as it looked last year. Or the year before. Or the decade before.
Nope, not flashy. And not what we have right now.
It's not just bridges. It's everything here in the United States that brings cars from place to place, people from place to place, water, sewage, electricity, heating and those things we take for granted to us as we go about life without danger to life and limb. And not one bit of it is flashy.
We can sell billions of weapons to the wealthiest countries and call it "Military Aid". We can plunge billions into voting machines that don't work accurately, then hold off on fixing them because the fixing might be a tad chaotic. (Or we could have an election with paper and pencils and people counting the votes, using tally sheets. Just like countries that have democratic processes that work very well thank you, such as Canada, the United Kingdom, France and even Iraq.)
Yes, we brought democracy to Iraq, but didn't even think of putting those electronic gizmo's that can be hacked into all the poling places because they don't have the infrastructure to support them. They don't have the electricity, and without electricity, the whiz-bang voting machines wouldn't even appear secure to the voters.
But I digress.
We are so intent on building the flashy stuff. We are like magpies, accruing the shiny bits in our surroundings that we forget a nest that isn't secure won't support the living creatures that will be born there and grow up there. A bird, no matter how much flash they want to entice a mate, pays attention first to the infrastructure. If they return year after year to the same nest, they repair first, bring the flashy bits later.
Flash is an afterthought. Infrastructure is a constant need.
We've spent the past decades presuming that since the bridges, roads, steam pipes, electric grids, and water systems we depend upon work, that those things will work forever. Without repair. Without structural integrity. We presume the bridge will be there even if the bridge receives failing grades for TWO YEARS!!!
We are wrong.
We are willing to take chances with our lives, and the lives of babies, mothers and school children to spend more on those shiny weapons for wealthy nations, or to bomb others into the stone age.
The purpose of government is to promote the public welfare. None of us, not one of us, is wealthy enough to be able to afford to construct all the parts of infrastructure that serve us daily, but only building those parts large enough to support each of us alone. We have government for that.
We have concentrated our public building on stadiums and sports arenas, forgetting that fans won't show up if they are lying at the bottom of a river after attempting to attend a game in one of those flashy, shiny new stadiums built with public dollars.
We allow ourselves to use aging and unsafe infrastructure on a daily basis. If the supports of our own homes were inspected and given a failing grade, we would replace or repair. Why don't we have the same urgency about roads that receive failing grades for multiple years in a row?
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