Could it have been prevented?
Posted: Friday, August 03, 2007 6:25 AM by Noah Oppenheim
This morning marks our second day covering the heart-breaking tragedy in Minnesota. Beyond the scope of the human tragedy, most striking is the revelation that the government knew this bridge was “structurally deficient.” Which suggests one of two possibilities… either the term doesn’t mean what it sounds like it means, or someone was criminally negligent.
No surprise then that public officials are opting for the former, semantic explanation. Indeed, at a press conference yesterday afternoon Tom Everett of the National Bridge Inspection Program said the term “structurally deficient” is a “programmatic classification” that is not an indication a bridge is dangerous. Fair enough. But neither is it an affirmation that the bridge is especially safe.
Nationwide, approximately 12% of our bridges have been deemed “structurally deficient.” Should any of those 77,000 similarly flawed structures collapse at some future date, we will ask – like we are asking now—could it have been prevented?
The answer is, of course it could have been prevented. But there is little chance it will be, and for good reason. At this very moment there are countless looming, preventable future disasters. They range from loose nuclear devices possibly being smuggled out of the sieve that is the former Soviet Union, to the rising oceans that Al Gore has famously warned of. If a “loose nuke”goes off, or Manhattan floods, we will know we could have done something to stop it. But, if we try to avert every potential calamity, we will have little time for anything else.
Last night, the Federal government asked the states to immediately inspect any bridges similar to the steel-deck truss bridge that collapsed on Wednesday. So, for now, the steel-deck truss threat has been elevated to Orange.
We tend to only deal with risks when they cross some hard-to-define, impossible-to-predict level of social tolerance. There is often a cost to this procrastination, but I suspect there is no better alternative. And it's hard to argue any one person or agency is truly at fault.
