people learn from history - when they want to

i appreciated this article on msnbc this morning that discussed bridge deficiency and the need of repair. Here are a few excerpts:

"More than 70,000 bridges across the country are rated structurally deficient like the span that collapsed in Minneapolis and engineers estimate repairing them all would take at least a generation and cost more than $188 billion"

"But with that said, as a result of this catastrophic disaster, we’re going to be looking at the rules and finding out in fact if they should be tightened, made more stringent"

"They are built not to fall down. This is an anomaly and we’re going to try to find out why this is an anomaly and prevent that anomaly from ever happening again"

"We’re not doing what the engineers are saying we need to be doing"

"At least 73,533 of 607,363 bridges in the nation, or about 12 percent, were classified as structurally deficient"

welcome to my job. i encounter this stuff every day. problems on top of problems with all sorts of things from pipes being too small going beneath your grandmas house, to dams that could break, to old brick culverts running beneath "O" Street that are falling apart and too small. (oh yeah, thats right!) and sometimes i see the disaster, the flood, and its not a surprise. and sometimes i hear the city official tell the single mother whose basement is full of water and her children dont have a place to sleep, that it wasent their fault. bla bla bla.

and it pisses me off.

but its also why i like my job, because thats the point i can say something. and i make the best case i can in hopes of convincing that power hungry beast that he needs to fix it. it is his fault.

but it gets weird. and complicated. like most things in life. because, in reality, its that single woman who pays the salary of that man, and pays taxes to fix the broken pipe going through her yard, and its my taxes too. and that tax money goes to other things we need like education and law enforcement. so we either a)pay more taxes for this stuff to be fixed, or b) the govrnmt needs to do a better job with allocating what they got.

oh deer.

so what happens today. a bridge collapses, kills people and someone is actually doing something. a friend made a comment to me this morning that the gov. is already working on a bill for the bridge/highway funds, and he was surprised. like "good for them." well, thats bs. shame on them. shame on them for waiting until six people die, hundreds hurt, and millions freaked out next time they drive their volvo across a bridge. why does it always take a tragedy before someone does anything?

oh and that $188 billion...where do you think thats going to come from?
"we're not doing what the engineers are saying we need to be doing." thats a bold statement. thanks for making it.