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When Will the Next Bridge Collapse?
Marc Pitzke, Der Spiegel (Germany)
The Minneapolis bridge disaster is no isolated incident but a warning signal: More than 160,000 road bridges in the USA are considered to be in danger of collapse. Highways, tunnels, dams and dykes are in such miserable condition that engineers have long been ringing the alarm — so far in vain.
…It doesn’t surprise experts. “The crumbling state of our infrastructure poses a real threat to public safety and the nation’s economy,” Bill Marcuson, the president of the American Society Of Civil Engineers (ASCE), wrote on his ASCE blog just a few days before the most recent disaster. “Financing the urgently needed repairs must become a priority for our nation’s leaders.” In total, ASCE calculates, at least $1.6 trillion must be invested in order to avoid further disasters like the one that happened this week in Minneapolis.
(3 August 2007)
Related: 77,000 US bridges in need of urgent repair (The Guardian).
Contributor SP writes:
As a distant disinterested observer I am somewhat amazed that the SUV-loving public of the US is unwilling to provide for the infrastructure required to enjoy their obsessions!
Bridge collapse spotlights America’s deferred maintenance
Ron Scherer, The Christian Science Monitor
About one-quarter of America’s 577,000 bridges were rated deficient in 2004.
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The tragic rush-hour collapse in Minneapolis of the I-35W Bridge over the Mississippi River is again forcing a reexamination of the nation’s approach to maintaining and inspecting critical infrastructure.
According to engineers, the nation is spending only about two-thirds as much as it should be to keep dams, levees, highways, and bridges safe. The situation is more urgent now because many such structures were designed 40 or 50 years ago, before Americans were driving weighty SUVs and truckers were lugging tandem loads.
It all adds up to a poor grade: The American Society of Civil Engineers gave the nation a D in 2005, the latest report available, after assessing 12 categories of infrastructure ranging from rails and roads to wastewater treatment and dams.
“One of America’s great assets is its infrastructure, but if you don’t invest it deteriorates,” says Patrick Natale, executive director of ASCE.
Among scores of recent examples…
(3 August 2007)
Related:
Our brittle infrastructure, our nonresilient economy (Gristmill)
U.S. highway system badly in need of repair (MSNBC)
800 of Bay Area’s spans rated same as fallen bridge (San Francisco Chronicle)
300 Washington bridges deemed “structurally deficient.” (Seattle Times)
Were bison one of globalization’s first victims?
Dawn Walton, Globe and Mail
Economist says Europeans, with their insatiable demand for hides, were more to blame than Americans for the devastation of herds
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CALGARY – The near-extinction of the plains bison in the United States has long been blamed on the advent of the railways, native overhunting and a government policy of slaughter designed to address the “Indian problem.”
But a Canadian researcher has discovered that globalization was the real culprit for the decimation of the U.S. bison herd in the 19th century.
M. Scott Taylor, an economist at the University of Calgary who used international trade records and first-person accounts of the hunt, has found that European development of a cheap and easy tanning method after 1870 fuelled that continent’s insatiable appetite for bison hides, which could be turned into shoe soles and machinery belts.
“The paper is really about solving a murder mystery and showing that the usual suspects are in fact innocent and that this other suspect – international trade – is the guilty party,” Prof. Taylor said.
His 57-page study, which presents an unconventional theory about what happened to the species, was recently published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, a prestigious non-profit think tank based in Cambridge, Mass.
The report deflects some blame from the Americans, but it is also instructive for many developing countries that currently rely on resource exports yet are struggling through civil wars. Few have guidelines governing resource use.
(31 July 2007)
We of the Neverland
Simon Castles, The Age
‘I DON’T want to grow up. I don’t want to be a man. I want always to be a little boy and to have fun.” So said Peter Pan as he set off for Neverland in J. M. Barrie’s immortal fairytale. But were Peter Pan living in Melbourne today, he wouldn’t have to fly away anywhere. He could be as boyish as he liked, for as long as he liked, right here. His playfulness would moreover be seen as good – even essential – for the economy.
The signs are everywhere that childishness is more popular than ever, that infantilism is in. Look around. Adults read Harry Potter, rapt like children. Movie screens are dominated by cartoon characters, pirates, superheroes and sequels (“Tell me the story again, Mummy!”). Workers queue round the block to buy a new brand of doughnut. Women dress like teenagers. Men lose days playing with their Wiis.
On Facebook, we ask others to be our friends, we “poke” them and scrawl on “walls”. The website of the moment is like one gigantic school playground.
Meanwhile, a TV ad calls on baby boomers to spend the kids’ inheritance on themselves – go on, be selfish and impulsive, buy a Harley-Davidson! – and another ad has a couple of skinny-dipping wrinklies giggle dismissively as a young woman tells them to “grow up”.
But why grow up when there’s so much fun to be had? Why grow up when the world feels terrifying and unfathomable, when escapism is as warm and comforting as buttery toast? Why grow up when our faith in progress is flagging, and we feel it’s impossible to make a difference? Why grow up when history’s grand narratives (Christianity, communism, etc) have largely been replaced by a faith in capitalism, a system that works OK but only if we buy things we don’t really need, like toys?
St Paul exhorted us to put away childish things, but St Paul didn’t know that one day childish things would drive the economy. Growing up is now a lifestyle choice.
Simon Castles is a Melbourne writer.
(5 August 2007)
Contributor SP writes:See the series “The Century of the Self” for a similar perspective.
