MINNEAPOLIS — "Minnesota officials were warned as early as 1990 that the bridge that collapsed into the Mississippi River was "structurally deficient," yet they relied on patchwork repairs and stepped-up inspections that unraveled amid a thunderous plunge of concrete and automobiles.
"We thought we had done all we could," state bridge engineer Dan Dorgan told reporters not far from the mangled remains of the span. "Obviously something went terribly wrong."
On several occasions I had the misfortune to drive over that accident waiting to happen, and when traffic would stall, as it often did, you could hear the groaning and screeching of the expansion joints as the bloody thing would vibrate from the overload. So what did the "Minnesota officials" do to prevent such a tragedy from happening? They passed a gas tax hike that would go to mass transit with the hope that more and more people would leave their cars home and drive over this joke as well as the other dilapidated and poorly constructed bridges, in buses.
Back to the drawing board, eh guys? Next time around you might think about using the ton of money the Feds send you along with your usury taxes to fix some of the crumbling infrastructures rather than paving then repaving those roads leading to the fancy neighborhoods. Then again, who cares, right? Only the poor folk send their kids to school on buses, and nobody important was hurt.
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