What keeps the bridges up?

The bridge collapse in Minneapolis is still garnering nationwide media attention. In Tennessee the governor has ordered immediate inspections of all bridges of similar construction, and members of Congress are already demanding accountability and clamoring for more funds to maintain bridges.


I think this is all rather silly. America's infrastructure needs long-term, steady commitment, not a flash-in-the-pan flurry of clumsily allocated funding. An op-ed piece in Popular Mechanics following the bridge collapse in Minneapolis lamented how we have built an amazing infrastructure in this country but we are reluctant to maintain it. That's how politics works -- we spend billions on the popular issues but we tend to ignore the unglamorous items like road maintenance. Except that road maintenance probably has much more of a direct impact on our lives than many other congressional pet projects.

As strange as it sounds, these disastrous events are often fascinating. In the last few years I've had an inside source on civil engineering failures through my dad, who works at a big engineering and architectural firm that does a lot of the forensic examinations and third-party evaluations when buildings collapse. So when things come down, like the Boston Big Dig cave-in or the Minneapolis bridge failure or the Pittsburgh Convention Center floor collapse, my dad and his firm are there within hours, picking over the wreckage to try to figure out what went wrong. My dad says it's really interesting work, like the building version of CSI. Most of the time there aren't any injuries or deaths, but they aren't always so lucky. Once his firm has finished the report, I'll have to find out what some of the causes were.

In the meantime, the media will buzz about the bridge for another week or two and then move on to the next big thing. I just hope we don't take all the roads and pipes and cables and power lines for granted. Having lived outside the U.S. in countries with less-developed infrastructures, I can attest that it makes a huge difference in quality of living. It's easy to forget about them when they're here, but as soon as they're gone, you miss them.