Pittsburgh bridge collapse sends morning traffic into ravine

Yup. My bicycling route home from work used to go under the 35W bridge. I would normally have been on the bike path under it or just about under it at the time that it fell, but I just happened to work late that day. I heard about it because a co-worker called me at the shop to suggest that I take a different route home that night, because I wouldn’t be able to get home if I went my usual route. We had quite a few back-and-forth sentences before she actually told me that the bridge had fallen.

12 Likes

So Minnesotan to not just spit out what you mean. Nope, gottta hint at what you’re trying to say for waaay too long. :roll_eyes:

Different problem in Michigan - no one tells you anything unless you ask questions, and those better be carefully and precisely crafted in order to extract the information you need. :rage:

11 Likes

Your capitalism at work! People who don’t want to have bridges falling down when they cross them will avoid those bridges, and the invisible hand of the market will favor the the other, non-collapsing bridges those people utilize. Wait-- what?

8 Likes

Or, the previous generation gave us this great infrastructure that was so well built that we can save money by not maintaining it and just hoping it will last until it is the next generation’s problem. Profit!

11 Likes
4 Likes

Oof. I remember the news of that as a kid. I have seen a technical explanation of how that happened, and it is pretty scary how one little detail created an engineering failure. :confused:

3 Likes

+1 for the cheese, but even the BBC doesn’t have posh accents any more! It’s all about regional accents these days, and for some of those subtitles become important. :laughing:

1 Like
11 Likes

Bryan Cranston Reaction GIF

9 Likes
10 Likes

The biggest legacy in italian engineering (bridges and roads at least) is how in the last 70 years or so, was that they’d accounted for grift, mafia involvement, and general disinterest in where public money ended up (unless it’s with you or yours) and overengineered. For the most part, it worked well.

4 Likes

Bizarrely, I’ve already seen a Fox News website news article trying to imply the bridge collapse puts the lie to Biden’s infrastructure plans. Not sure how, since the only thing I could find to suggest this was an isolated quote by a guy from a conservative nonprofit, being interviewed on Tucker Carlson. Most weirdly of all he seems to be blaming Biden for literally the opposite of everything his administration has done or tried to do:

4 Likes

This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.