Americas' Bridges are Falling Down

8-02-07 Forget London, Americas’ bridges are falling down In one of my past lives, I was a bridge engineer, inspector and builder. It is with great sadness that I heard the news from Milwaukee, sadness and a sense of the inevitable. Our politicians are non-technical people in a very technical world. We need better leadership. I could write reams about our decrepit infrastructure. Like so many things, it takes crisis to wake people. The question is will it be too late? There are dedicated men and women throughout the civil engineering industry. How can a major bridge collapse? Human error? Sabotage? Or a sad inevitability? Enron was a Clinton scandal. That’s why it fell off the radar screen. One of the many things Enron did was to cut back or eliminate maintenance on infrastructure. This gives you a 30% boost in short term profits. You pay for it in the long run but it is hard to detect. Maintenance is not glamorous. Politicians don’t pose for ribbon cutting ceremonies after you wash a bridge. Of the hundreds of bridges I inspected, regular washing would have saved many from deterioration. You need to wash the sand from the drainage system. When the drains get filled with dirt the water seeks a new path. This path is usually past the bearings of the structure. The bearings rust and fail. They cease to move. A bridge must move to relieve the stress of expansion and contraction. If it can’t move then the structure begins to crack and fail. I visited one bridge once that I knew was thirty years old but it looked brand new. I searched for the reason that this bridge avoided early decrepitude. It turned out that a volunteer fire department took it upon themselves to have a training exercise each year and clean the bridge. Great idea! Why don’t we do this all over the country? Well, lots of reasons. Most Departments of Transportation use union labor. The union wants the labor to go to their people. It doesn’t matter that there are not enough union workers to do the work or would they want to. Plus, many politicians want maintenance projects to go to their friends in the construction business. If volunteers do the work there is less money in their friends’ hands and less to fall into their pockets. So, what we need to do is to talk the volunteer fire departments into cleaning the bridges in secrecy then perhaps fewer bridges would collapse due to neglect. Politicians are the real problem. I have first hand knowledge of the funding crisis in just one state DOT. The current budget in my state is about $300 million per year. Sounds like a lot and it is but it is about 1/3 of what is needed. What’s more is that they would need to spend those billion dollars every year for the next ten years to catch up to the raveling infrastructure. Multiply that by fifty states and you start to see the magnitude of the problem. There is another gorilla in the room. Nobody talks about it but everyone knows it’s there. This is the systemic corruption of organized crime. A long time ago, I supervised a bridge building project. Not huge, it was to be a fairly common bridge replacement. I calculated pay items and managed the project for the local government. It became clear that the concrete pours were off by 10%. I am a bit naïve and so, thought it was my calculations or some other error. I reported my findings up through my chain of command. I was told to drop it. I couldn’t since I thought it could be my error. So, I refined my calcs and finally decided to get the State police to bring in their portable truck scales and weigh the concrete trucks before and after the pour. That was when the contractor canceled the scheduled pour costing him about $15,000. The next day a carload of stereotypical shaved gorillas came out to my humble place in the country. They just made sure I saw them and then they left. After talking with my lawyer, I dropped my investigation but did a few more calculations just for fun. The scam I had discovered if multiplied just across my one fairly average city would account for $100 million dollars per year. I am certain that they would have killed me and my family for much less. I got out of that job as quick as I could. But that was just one of many cases of corruption. Organized crime is parasitic. It violates the letter of the law and tears at the fabric of our society. Fear of violent retribution and fear for your livelihood all serve the dark side. It is a cancer. How do you kill the cancer without killing the host? I don’t know. One answer is to hold our politicians to a higher standard. The other answer is to get everyone a magical flying car since bridges will continue to fail until we make a dedicated effort to fix the problems. Crispus Attucks