What a perfect metaphor for the collapse of our Republic and the wannabe empire. It just says it all.
America is going down river, folks.

Posted by: Bea | Aug 2 2007 13:18 utc | 3

imagine how much worse it would be if we weren’t protecting ourselves by investing all that blood and treasure fighting the terrorists.
just to let you know what an evil person i am my first thought was of the criminal haley barbour, and how it happened in a red state.

Posted by: annie | Aug 2 2007 14:22 utc | 5

methinks you are seeing things. the right end of the section clearly collapses before the left. no visible sign of a charge at the left end either.

Posted by: b real | Aug 2 2007 15:34 utc | 7

Also – why should anyone blow up that bridge?
don’t you know that the only mooooslim US congressman comes from Minnesota?
I haven’t checked the knucklehead blogs yet but I would not be surprised to see them come up with this great revelation.
CNN planted the seed of doubt some time ago

Posted by: dan of steele | Aug 2 2007 16:20 utc | 9

New rule: never assign to malice that which can be assigned to deferred maintenance.

Posted by: Browning | Aug 2 2007 18:06 utc | 11

No controls. Pseudo science. Unscientific arithmetic. Long hierarchical chains.
I *imagine*:
The guy – or maybe a sweet gal wearing a cute helmet and tight pants up front on the website – sent to check and measure is a student or lowly person, earning 25 an hour, reports to a supervisor who wants no probs, earns 50 or more an hour, glances, disses, or doesn’t understand; he reports to his superior, who earns 200 an hour, on the phone, some jabbing about a structural fault, who knows, the lowly employee is fulla shit, etc, – covering his ass – on the take, he writes it all down.
The superior, top boss, in contact with the Gov (who earns far more than all the others..) says “We can handle it, don’t worry….”
Oh what a surprise! The whole thing collapses.
Individual actors in competition have no interest in the common good. Not one of the ppl in my imagined example gave a flying f** that the bridge went down. In fact, most of them can make money from its collapse. If only to keep their jobs.
Of course that doesn’t mean that there are no conscientious professionals (engineers etc) in the US, nor that this doesn’t happen in other countries.

Posted by: Noirette | Aug 2 2007 19:28 utc | 13

I went back to take another look, after seeing the disagreement here.
Yes the central part of the bridge broke loose and fell first, then after standing for a bit the left part(in the video) fell. I didn’t notice that on my first viewing.
Both ends of the central section broke loose at the same time. The same time. Mighty weak structure eh? Or coordinated cutting. Oh yes and don’t forget that witnesses heard one or more explosions. Nope – just falling concrete.

Posted by: rapt | Aug 2 2007 20:52 utc | 15

Don’t worry, $30bn in free aid is going to Israel, who cares about little pork projects that maintain infrastructure.

Posted by: Cloned Poster | Aug 2 2007 21:38 utc | 17

Politics is Personal
The 35W bridge in Minnesota collapsed yesterday. It was rated structurally deficient about two years ago. I live in the Delaware Valley. Delaware has 35 bridges with the same rating, New Jersey has 760, and Pennsylvania, sit down, 5900! (That was not a typo.) Many of these bridges have been structurally deficient for many years.
How long did the Federal Government and Louisiana know of the problems with the walls and levees that the residents of New Orleans thought were there to protect them. They all saw the GIS modelling. They all knew what would happen if a category 4 or 5 hurricane hit there. Ivan scared them. They got lucky. They never spent the money to build proper protection and they all knew what would happen.
Not to even mention healthcare for everyone, the nation’s electric grid system, lack of new refineries, and on and on.
“No, no, no, you silly citizens.”
“We’ve been spending $20 billion US dollars a month in Iraq!”
As of today, August 2, 2007, 3661 Americans have lost their lives there, 3954 total coalition forces. Anywhere from 70,00, to 600,000+ Iraqis have lost their lives. There are many more than that seriously injured. Their are millions of refugees.
I’ll stop.
You know.
The George W. Bush administration lied their way into this most recent Iraq war. They lied to Congress, the American people and the entire world. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney knew all along that Iraq was no threat, that the aluminum tubes were not for uranium enrichment, that those trailers were not mobile biological or chemical weapons’ labs, that Iraq had nowhere near the capability to strike the US with nuclear missiles in 45 minutes, and that Iraq never got close to getting uranium from Niger. They knew that most, possibly all, of Iraq’s WMD had been destroyed.
UNSCOM had worked reasonably well.
The Bush administration knows there never was a Saddam – Al Qaeda connection. They know Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11/2001.
They constantly lie.
If the House of Reprsentatives doesn’t impeach the lot of them, then I don’t know what impeachment will ever be used for in the future.
Bastards!

Posted by: Mark G | Aug 2 2007 23:40 utc | 19

Alex,
I know that some bridges has fallen in Sweden. Generally pretty small ones in combination with some form of extreme weather. Sweden has a lot of country side, lots of rivers, thus lots of small bridges and not all are maintained the way they should be. For the same reasons, there are generally few people hurt though.
On the other hand, in the wintertime some rivers are roads in northern Sweden. So then you do not need bridges.
And thanks to b, I just spent two hours constructing bridges…

Posted by: a swedish kind of death | Aug 3 2007 0:58 utc | 21

Minnesota ranks first in deaths in 2007 from bridge collapses. (Alaska ranks 1st in bridges to nowhere.) The American people rank last under this administration.
well said. quotable.

Posted by: DeAnander | Aug 3 2007 3:22 utc | 23

We’re building an extension of the rail transit system here under one of those new public/private partnerships (P3’s). Hours for every aspect of the design work, and every thing else, were pre-set by MBA types. Architectural and Engineering firms working on the project are pulling their hair with the amount of administrative paper they are obligated to produce, design drawings and specifications in VERY tight time frames, fiercely controlled fees, shortage of manpower in a vibrant economy; you think a few welds aren’t going to be missed?
Our transit extension is simply new infrastructure. Repair, up-grading, etc of existing infrastructure is bogged down by the same MBA mentality. Until that mentality is crushed, eradicated, abandoned, burnt at the stake, whatever, we’re groping as a society.
And now we have to face Peak Oil, declining US dollar, and whatever else, with the same MBA’s in the way. We can’t go forward as a society until we’re rid of them. Is Bush actually a diplomed MBA?

Posted by: Allen/Vancouver | Aug 3 2007 4:14 utc | 25

There was a bridge in Denmark that collapsed earlier this year — it was while they were repairing it, and the only casualty was a foreman who was under the bridge, inspecting it.
A small thing I suppose, but there are lots of things that happen that you don’t hear about unless you are a local.
Furthermore, I think the number of deaths needed to make world news depends on where it happens. What I mean is, a boat capsizing in Farawaystan won’t make the news unless there are a hundred or more drowned, when it happens in “God’s Own Country”, the threshold is much lower. That’s just the way it is.

Posted by: Chuck Cliff | Aug 3 2007 7:15 utc | 27

Hi Allen, I’m here too.
Let’s try thetyee.ca, there’s a recent link to Canadian blogs.

Posted by: jonku | Aug 3 2007 9:23 utc | 29

@askod – And thanks to b, I just spent two hours constructing bridges…
You’re welcome 🙂 Hope they hold up.
—
@rapt – 15 – the video
Here is the complete video with time information. That security camera took only like 2 picture per second instead of 30 as usual TV-cameras do. The bridge didn’t come down so fast as it looks.

Posted by: b | Aug 3 2007 12:34 utc | 31

The Star Tribune from Minnesota writes:

Structural deficiencies in the Interstate 35W bridge that collapsed Wednesday were so serious that the Minnesota Department of Transportation last winter considered bolting steel plates to its supports to prevent cracking in fatigued metal, according to documents and interviews with agency officials.
The department went so far as to ask contractors for advice on the best way to approach such a task, which could have been opened for bids later this year.
…
He said inspectors have long been on the lookout for metal fatigue and cracking in the bridge because it was designed before engineers learned about dangers to bridges from fatigue cracking.
“Up until the late 1960s, it was thought that fatigue was not a phenomenon you would see in bridges. Unfortunately that was a wrong assumption,” Dorgan said.
…
A construction industry official who met with MnDOT about shortcomings on the I-35W bridge told the Star Tribune that there have been ongoing concerns among some MnDOT employees about the safety of this and other similar bridges.
“There were people over there that were deathly afraid that this kind of tragedy was going to be visited on us,” the industry official said. “There were people in the department that were screaming to have these replaced.”MnDOT has been trying to move these ‘fracture critical’ bridges up in their [budget] sequencing so something like this wouldn’t happen,” the source said.

But MnDOT didn’t have enough money to do some immediate and solid repairs …

Posted by: b | Aug 3 2007 14:10 utc | 33

Ensley, Wall St. got hysterical when Clinton announced he’d budget money for infrastructure in ’93. They want it defunded to provide a pretext for them to piratize it. It has nothing to do w/the war.

Posted by: jj | Aug 3 2007 16:25 utc | 35

Thank you b, for the faster video clip. Notice that the first frame begins with the center section of the bridge already in downward motion; the beginning is clipped out. But in spite of that it is quite evident that both ends broke loose at the same time. At the same time. (Are you getting bored yet?)
Point is, faster more continuous video does nothing to change what is more evident in the stop-action one, that both ends of the center section fell straight down at the same time. For the physics-deficient among us, this means that both ends of the span were severed at (nearly) exactly the same time; additionally you will notice that across the width of the roadway there is uniformity in the speed of collapse. One side didn’t fall first from a fatigue crack let us say, and drag the other side down to the point of fracture. You are welcome to apply the appropriate math to this; it will prove that all four corners of the center span lost support at precisely the same time, give or take a small fraction of a second. **- Cutting charges wired for simultaneous detonation -**
It is hard to see such denial on this issue after all the violent scare scenarios we have seen over the past few years; I won’t try to enumerate them but there have been quite a few of these, going back to Waco, Murrah building, several others.
Yes it could have been an accident due to bad structure and maintenance, but the evidence shows otherwise.

Posted by: rapt | Aug 3 2007 21:43 utc | 37

Rapt, tin-foil hat etc.
If this was a “true” terrorism act by disgruntled team of individuals (Iraqis, Iranians, Timothy McViegh types etc) that came of the blue from nowhere, the FBI would be shitting themselves and paint the picture and story we are witnessing now.

Posted by: Cloned Poster | Aug 3 2007 22:03 utc | 39

@ Cloned Poster – Thanks for the “Interesting link”. Fascinating and to think that 8 years ago they sat me down and said, “draw a pier cap” and I’m “what’s a pier cap?”.
btw, the company I work for is in this, up to our necks. We got an email this morning: “Don’t talk to the media”.

Posted by: beq | Aug 4 2007 2:44 utc | 41

rapt–
Thank you much for the link.
No, you do not understand what you are looking at. The near end of the bridge gives way first. What we can not see is if both the left and right sides give way at the same time. But this proves nothing: One side could twist, crack, and bring down the other. If both sides of the near end were in poor condition, this would not be strange at all. One simply needs more evidence.
But the far end of the bridge does not fall for several moments. The near end is descending, and the entire structure is pivoting, slowly. As the near end accelerates in falling, more stress–downward–is placed on the far end of the span. The span starts with NO angular momentum, and the far end has to supply it, but that means increasing stress. For a moment it holds, anyway, but when the downward stress exceeds its capacity it buckles downward. This reduces the stress on the far end, and reduces the energy going to turning the span end over end. The span falls into the river, turning SLOWLY end over end. So slowly that the near end hits only a moment before the far end. But definitely before.
Of course, a bomb WOULD do as well as a fatigue crack to start the collapse, but the manner of the fall reveals nothing. To distinguish malice from accident, you have to look at the component that initiated failure.
For now I’ll bet on fatigue failure.

Posted by: Gaianne | Aug 4 2007 6:04 utc | 43

Troubled Water.

Posted by: Cloned Poster | Aug 4 2007 20:10 utc | 45