Posted
8/02/2007 05:30:00 PM
by Douglas
A bridge collapsed. People died. In America. This kind of thing isn't supposed to happen, and looking at the horrible pictures, the only thing that comes to my mind, is how in the hell could this kind of thing happen here? Seriously, all structures have such nutty safety factors, for something like
this to happen, something had to have gone really wrong a long time ago. But think about
this the next time you drive over a bridge, and also think about how much we, as a society, pay our lawyers, accountants, and stock brokers and how much we pay our engineers.
More than 70,000 bridges across the country are rated structurally deficient like the span that collapsed in Minneapolis, and engineers estimate repairing them all would take at least a generation and cost more than $188 billion.
That works out to at least $9.4 billion a year over 20 years, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers.
The bridges carry an average of more than 300 million vehicles a day.
Sleep tight, America!
Not to denigrate accountants or lawyers, but honestly, do you need an attorney every day? Do you drive on a bridge every day? If your accountant fucks up are you going to
DIE?