Bridge Repair on the Cheap

Photo by Jim Gehrz, Star Tribune

Divers continued recovery efforts Friday at the scene where the I-35W bridge collapsed.


Minneapolis Star Tribune: MnDOT chose 'most cost efficient' of 3 options

In lay terms, they picked the cheapest fix. Bridge fell down. You get what you pay for.

How Many Bridges in Your State Are 'Structurally Deficient'?

ABC News: Minn. Bridge Collapse: Survivors' Photos
A side view of the I35 W after it buckled into chunks.
(Kimberly Brown and Kelly Kahle)

MSNBC has posted a chart that shows bridges that are "structurally deficient" for all 50 states:

MSNBC: State by state: 'Deficient' and 'Obsolete' Bridges

Massachusetts and Pennsylvania are the worst with over 50% of bridges "structurally deficient" or "functionally obsolete".

For Massachusetts, that's what 20 years of tax-cutting Republican governors gets you.

Security Camera Records Minneapolis Bridge Collapse

Minnesota Bridge Collapse

The collapse left vehicles scattered along the rubble of the bridge.

Photo: Heather Munro/Star Tribune, via Associated Press


CNN interviewed the Minnesota governor this morning, and he said well, this bridge did show structural issues in an inspection last year, but there are 80,000 other bridges in the country with the same level of deterioration; and that's not the worst ranking. Apparently there's a list of tens of thousands of other bridges that are even more structurally deficient.

ABC News says that more than a quarter -- 27% -- of the country's 600,000 bridges are structurally deficient:

According to the Center for International and Strategic Studies, more than a quarter of the country's bridges are structurally unstable. A federal report in 2005 said Minnesota's Interstate 35W bridge was structurally deficient and may need to be repaired.

Ron Beasley at Middle Earth Journal puts it this way:

[W]e should be looking at the revenue starved collapsing infrastructure of the United States. A much greater threat than al-Qaeda could ever be.

And why is our infrastructure revenue starved? It's the crazy Republican fetish for tax cuts. And the absolutely insane Iraq war, where we will spend more than a trillion dollars according to the Congressional Budget Office. Imagine if we had used that money to repair our crumbling infrastructure. Some people in Minneapolis might be alive today.

Massive Bridge Collapse in Minneapolis

This video frame grab taken from KMSP television shows the scene of a freeway bridge over the Mississippi River in Minneapolis Wednesday, Aug. 1, 2007. The entire span of the 35W bridge collapsed about 6:05 p.m. where the freeway crosses the river near University Avenue. (AP Photo/KMSP-TV)

WaPo (AP): Bridge Falls Into Mississippi River

MINNEAPOLIS -- The entire span of an interstate bridge collapsed into the Mississippi River during evening rush hour Wednesday, sending vehicles, tons of concrete and twisted metal crashing into the water.

The Interstate 35W bridge, a major link between Minneapolis and St. Paul, was in the midst of being repaired when it broke into several huge sections.

"There were two lanes of traffic, bumper to bumper, at the point of the collapse. Those cars did go into the river," Minneapolis Police Lt. Amelia Huffman. "At this point there is nothing to suggest that this was anything other than a structural collapse."

I heard a Minnesota-based Foxbot talking to Shepard Smith about the bridge collapse. She said, in essence, that she didn't know if this was a factor, but Minneapolis has been in the grip of a heatwave all summer. They quickly took her off the air!

The collapse is much more likely due to the fact that it's a 40 year old bridge (opened in 1967) which, when inspected in 2006, was found to have "cracks in bridge superstructure that needed attention."

Best comment on the bridge collapse, from commenter xxdr zombiexx at dailykos:

Things crumbling was a hallmark of Soviet-era incompetence and dereliction of duty.

Archer Daniel Midland Cornholes the World

I have a pet nutritional theory, that the replacement of truly sweet sugar with not very sweet but cheap and plentiful corn syrup is what has caused our worldwide obesity epidemic. Corn syrup is not satisfying, so people just keep eating and drinking more for the satisfaction that only real sugar can provide. I'm no scientist, but the explosion of obesity has happened in the last 30 years. What has changed? Read the label of anything in your cupboard. It contains some corn-based sweetener.

WaPo, March 2003: Sweet but Not So Innocent?
High-Fructose Corn Syrup May Act More Like Fat Than Sugar in the Body

In 1966, refined sugar, also known as sucrose, held the No. 1 slot, accounting for 86 percent of sweeteners used, according to the USDA. Today, sweeteners made from corn are the leader, racking up $4.5 billion in annual sales and accounting for 55 percent of the sweetener market. That switch largely reflects the steady growth of high-fructose corn syrup, which climbed from zero consumption in 1966 to 62.6 pounds per person in 2001.

Corn is also an environmental disaster. From treehugger.com:

Attack of the killer corn

Bolstered by government subsidies that have averaged about $4 billion annually since 1995, U.S. production accounts for nearly 40 percent of the world's corn output. Every year, the USDA reports, corn farmers dump more than 10 billion pounds of nitrogen fertilizer onto their fields -- a heavier dose than for any other crop by a factor of nearly three. (Source: Download table 2 from this USDA/Economic Research page.)

This annual cascade of "artificial fertility" (as the farmer and activist Jason McKenney calls it) parches soil of nitrogen-fixing bacteria. It crushes biodiversity and makes soils reliant on more fertilizer. According to McKenney, less than a fifth of that nitrogen makes it into corn plants.

The rest leeches into groundwater, feeding algae blooms that smother water-borne life from the northern reaches of the Mississippi River clear down to the Gulf of Mexico, where a dead zone about the size of New Jersey emerges each year, blotting out what was once a robust source of food and jobs, to say nothing of an important marine habitat. As Richard Manning puts it in the winter 2004 American Scholar (unavailable online):

Already, the Dead Zone has seriously damaged what was once a productive fishery, meaning that a high-quality source of low-cost protein is being sacrificed so that a source of low-quality, high-input subsidized protein can blanket the Upper Midwest.

In a sense, by ending up in the Gulf, that fertilizer is coming home: nitrogen-based fertilizer derives from natural gas.

[]

The real beneficiaries of this twisted system aren't most corn growers; it's the buyers, processing giants like Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill. That one-billion-bushel surplus of corn in 2004 exerted enormous downward pressure on corn prices. In 2004, a bushel -- 56 pounds -- of corn brought in $1.95 to the farmer. That's about 3 cents a pound. At that rate, the only way a farm can make any money at all is to scale up as much as possible and then hope for a government check. No wonder mid-sized farms are rapidly going extinct.

Archer Daniels Midland makes a killing off of our cheap-food system; a few mega-farms in the Midwest do OK as well. But for most people, and for the environment, what we get is a government-underwritten disaster.

I can't imagine a better place for greens, social-justice activists, and real-food enthusiasts to unite for change.

Local Slumlord Goes National

Landlord with Boston ties lashed for Katrina evictions

TERRYTOWN, La. -- Until the eviction notices began to arrive, Solomon Benjamin and Patti Joseph believed they had dodged the catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina.

Their one-bedroom apartment in this New Orleans suburb, which suffered no flooding or widespread destruction, was unharmed in the storm. Its good condition was verified by a federal inspector who found Joseph ineligible for housing assistance because of ''insufficient damage." Their landlord took a different view, launching an aggressive three-month campaign to remove Benjamin, Joseph, and all remaining tenants from the complex of about 200 units. Former residents believe the ouster took place so the units can be renovated and rented to higher-paying tenants.

"They didn't have to put nobody out," said Benjamin, 65, a retired shipyard painter who had lived in the complex for two years. "They just wanted us out."

"They" are Leonard J. Samia, one of Boston's largest and most notorious landlords, and LES Realty Trust, a Samia partnership that owns Louisburg Square Apartments, a sprawling cluster of low-income, two-story buildings on the west bank of the Mississippi River, 6 miles from the French Quarter.

According to former residents, housing advocates, and legal aid attorneys in Louisiana, Samia took advantage of the chaos that consumed New Orleans after the hurricane -- a lawless time when police, courts, and social service agencies were overwhelmed with emergencies -- to force out tenants. The tenants were among the city's most vulnerable residents, their lawyers said, lacking the money and know-how to fight the eviction pressure they faced.

I can't believe these sleazebags the Samias are still in business. My first apartment out of college was on Glenville Ave. in Allston, rented from the Samia Companies. The place crawled with cockroaches, the ceilings were falling in, and there was no maintenance. You could call for maintenance all you wanted, but it never came. As soon as I had a little money in the bank I moved out.

I always hoped to read that some Housing Court made one of the Samias live in one of their own hellhole apartments, but apparently that never happened.

No Wonder They're So Afraid of the Blame Game

Experts Say Faulty Levees Caused Much of Flooding

[W]ith the help of complex computer models and stark visual evidence, scientists and engineers at Louisiana State University's Hurricane Center have concluded that Katrina's surges did not come close to overtopping those barriers. That would make faulty design, inadequate construction or some combination of the two the likely cause of the breaching of the floodwalls along the 17th Street and London Avenue canals -- and the flooding of most of New Orleans.....

Congress authorizes flood- control projects -- after receiving recommendations from the Corps -- and the Corps oversees their design and construction.

John M. Barry -- who criticized the Corps in "Rising Tide," a history of the Mississippi River flood of 1927 -- said that if Katrina did not exceed the design capacity of the New Orleans levees, the federal government may bear ultimate responsibility for this disaster.

"If this is true, then the loss of life and the devastation in much of New Orleans is no more a natural disaster than a surgeon killing a patient by failing to suture an artery would be a natural death," Barry said. "And that surgeon would be culpable."

Like Jon Stewart said: "When people don't want to play the blame game? They're to blame."