Steel city in the Rust belt that needs some attention like so many other cities. (This coming from someone who has lived here for my entire life and is happy to see changes in industry in the area)
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I am a little surprised it isn’t happening more. KC has lots of iffy bridges. They did make a new, larger one across the river awhile ago.
Just last week a homeless dwelling under a bridge caught fire and damaged it, and tragically killing one person. The thing is, it happened before like 3 years ago. About 5 years ago we had a chunk of a NEW overpass fall apart. That was crazy and not inspiring confidence, but it has held since. knock on wood
We are a ticking time bomb for more of these failures.
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Nothing short of an amazing failure on his administration’s part. It was a popular bipartisan priority and yet kept getting kicked down the road so many times that “Infrastructure Week!” became a running punchline every time Trump was in the news with another crisis of his own creation.
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I really hope this scares the city into thinking about something other than Ben’s retirement. There should be…what, about 400 inspections happening immediately to figure out how to stop this before a worse incident?
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At least this was a low bridge. The Almö bridge disaster must have been a nighmare for drivers in a foggy night suddenly finding the bridge ahead of them gone, hit by a ship, and falling to their death.
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Sadly, inspecting only puts more on the list of “We really aught to do something about this.” Maybe the Infrastructure Bill will make a difference, but I have seen too many good intentions die aborning to get very excited. Show me actual improvements.
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When I was growing up, we only had DFL governors, and bridges never fell into either river! (Don’t forget about the Minnesota River, eh?) [we used that 35W bridge all.the.time to go to St. Anthony Falls.]
@lecti: Dr. Kochanski clearly isn’t a structural engineer or physicist. “X-beam”? Doesn’t realize those cables are tension cables? 
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It wasn’t just a failure. They actually undercut and cancelled critical infrastructure projects around the country even as Trump was promising unprecedented infrastructure spending.
Like the repair of transportation and telecommunications tunnels around NYC. That had, as of when he entered office, a plan in place from the Obama Administration. With a start date, contractors booked and funding plan with multiple states and big chunks of federal funding involved.
Trump pulled out the federal funding part, killing the program. Something like a quarter of the internet runs through those tunnels, and they’ve been on the verge of collapse since Hurricane Sandy. The delay in fixing the roads tunnels and bridges in the area now means it can take 8+ hours just to pass by the NYC area.
Trump was bragging about doing this to “punish” New York, while out of the otherside of his mouth he was promising infrastructure plans.
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Oh, we’ve been there for a long time, now.
The Greenfield Bridge, which went over a major highway, spent about a decade randomly dropping chunks of concrete. Until they wrapped the undercarriage with nets. After that failed, they built another fake bridge underneath it TO CATCH THE FALLING CONCRETE.
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Uh, it’s not THAT low. This is a view from underneath it.
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Freedom to let our infrastructure decay into piles of rust and concrete spalls…
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Kansas City has a bit of a long history with collapses:
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Thanks a lot, Obama! Er, I mean Biden!
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Nothing to see here, just the free market doing what it does. Government shouldn’t interfere with the normal operations of society. \s
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When the Mianus River Gorge Bridge collapsed in 1983, I lived close enough that I actually knew a kid who had brought home one of the “pins” holding the bridge together – he just found it lying on the ground under the bridge a few months before the collapse and brought the 2’ long, 3" diameter chunk of steel home to use as an exercise weight. While I doubt any action would have been taken by the state if they had known about the missing pin, other than harassing him for stealing state property. I always found that a bit morbid, that if critical bits were falling off the bridge perhaps leaving it where you found it and contacting the authorities might have been a better approach, but honestly the infrastructure of the time was so bad all the highways had signs saying “Roads are legally closed” to shift accountability away from the state, so even if it had been reported I doubt anything would have been done.
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Now if only we could get the elite class to pay their fair fucking share of taxes.
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