Category Archives: Bridge Collapse

Posts written about the August 1, 2007 collapse of the I35W Bridge, its aftermath, and the reconstruction.

Gas Tax: Still Not (Apparently) The Culprit

Posted on by
5

The Pioneer Press is apparently a tool of Tim Pawlenty; evidence apparently suggests that metal fatigue isn’t the culprit for the Bridge collapse (emphasis added):

In the days after the collapse, reports drawing on past inspections immediately singled out seemingly alarming cracks in the bridge’s steel. The Minnesota Department of Transportation came under fire for what appeared to be shoddy bridge oversight.

But a closer look at the record throws into question the idea MnDOT could have prevented the collapse by reinforcing the Minneapolis bridge, as an outside consultant recommended. The record also casts doubt on the theory that fatigue cracks made the bridge fall.

Here’s why:

— The cracks were repaired in the 1990s. And they were never found in the main I-35W river span, which appeared to fall first on video of the collapsing bridge captured by a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers surveillance camera.

— The cracks were on the approach spans, which were not “fracture critical.” That designation signals a risk of total collapse if one key part of the bridge fails. The fracture critical area of the bridge was in the main span.

— A proposal to strengthen the steel beams in the bridge’s main span by adding steel plates dealt with a speculative problem – potential cracks. The reinforcement also would not have guaranteed against a total collapse.

— Fatigue cracks are more likely to occur and spread in cold weather, when steel is less flexible. The I-35W bridge collapse came after several days of 90-degree-plus weather.

Unlike certain commentators, I would never replace science with my opinion.  I’ll await actual conclusions by real engineers. 

But if I may wax fantastic for a moment – that moment when some people are gonna have to apologize for accusing the Governor and David Strom of complicity in murder might seem to be creeping closer.

Duelling Agendas

Posted on by
11

The Strib’s been cranking out the stories (and the wishful thinking) about the 35W bridge collapse in the Strib.

According to Sarah Janecek at Politics in Minnesota, there’s a story behind the story:

One GOP legislator, disturbed by the secrecy shrouds detailed in the Star Tribune, sent an email to MnDOT asking what’s going on. [PIM obtained copies of the relevant emais.] Here’s how MnDOT answered the question:

“Unfortunately, the relationship between our employees and some reporters — and I stress ‘some reporters’ — at the Star Tribune has become extremely strained…MnDOT employees have been subjected to professional and unnecessarily harsh name-calling, hostile phone conversations and phone and email harassment. MnDOT employees have come to me with reports of enduring profanity in phone conversations and having their professional and personal integrity questioned. Employees have further reported that, when they have granted interviews and provided professional information, they feel their work has been mischaracterized in print and facts have been disregarded in lieu of predetermined story lines.”

I’d ask someone from the Strib for a comment – but they’d probably punch me.

Janecek:

To be precise, MnDOT employees are tired of hearing “BS” in heated long form, and “you’re lying” and “you’re stonewalling” from the two career Star Tribune reporters with pit bull reputations: Tony Kennedy and Paul McEnroe. What’s more, a document request made one hour is followed by a series of harassing emails mere hours later asking where their documents are.

Reporters acting like jagbags? Nothing new, right?

Of course, there’s more:

…Many of the document requests are duplicative — different people at the paper are asking for exactly the same stuff. As far as PIM knows, there are at least eight different requests from Star Tribune people. Besides Kennedy and McEnroe, other Star Tribune reporters who are asking for duplicative documents are Dan Browning, Nick Coleman, Pat Doyle, Jim Foti, Kaszuba and Bob Von Sternberg.

Typically, on a big story like the bridge collapse, one editor is put in charge. This apparently hasn’t happened.

In other words, the Strib’s newsroom – wracked by layoffs and budget cuts – is a Sacramento fire drill.

Or is there more?

Better media analysis minds than ours think there’s something else going on: Star Tribune editor Nancy Barnes and others at the paper want a Pulitzer for the paper’s coverage. That makes sense to us. The bridge collapse will likely be the only shot Minnesota media will have in our lifetimes at winning the “Breaking News” prize. [Let’s all certainly hope so.]

Which makes sense; it’s something people’ve been predicting since the spume from the river was still in the air. Indeed, many of us – the Strib’s legions of amateur critics – lauded the paper for its reporting (albeit not opinion writing) in the wake of the collapse, and figured the paper might be in line for its first Pulitzer since the Battle of Yorktown.

Does it affect the paper’s approach to journalism?:

The Pulitzer theory also explains why the paper repeatedly fails to point out MnDOT’s legal constraints on document requests, an omission that is grossly misleading to readers. Media requests for government documents are covered by the Minnesota Data Practices Act (MDPA) and the federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The most important aspect of these laws as they apply to obtaining government information about the bridge collapse is that the MDPA applies before August 1, 2007 and the federal FOIA applies after the bridge fell. That’s because the National Transportation Safety Board has an exemption from FOIA for any “ongoing investigation” so as not to jeopardize that investigation. Obviously, that exemption is broad and severely curtails the information MnDOT can legally provide.

Which – as Janecek alleges – is the part the Strib won’t tell the reader.

Is it just another example of “not having enough space” to fit it in – a standard Strib excuse when important details get left out? We’ve been through this before.

On the one hand, “jourmalistic ethics” tend to be exactly what a “journalist” needs them to be to get their story (and/or their Pulitzer).

On the other…well, read the whole thing.

If Plans Were Horses, Then Nick Coleman Could Ride To Water

Posted on by
15

Don’t mind those engineers. They were sitting in class taking calculus and learning the scientific method when people like Nick Coleman were learning how to…

…um…

…well, anyway.

The point being that even though the latest news on the Bridge Collapse investigation – the one being carried out by actual engineers – indicates that the bridge didn’t collapse as a direct result of the failure of the Gas Tax – Nick Coleman still knows better than all those dumb engineers:

Get ready to be gusseted.

Let’s stop right there.

Has Nick Coleman learned nothing from years of having his neologisms thrown back in his face wrapped in ridicule?

I doubt that many Minnesotans heard of gussets before Aug. 1, but since the collapse of the Interstate 35W bridge, “gusset” has become a favorite word in the mouths of politicians, particularly those looking to cast suspicion not on their politics or policies, but on inanimate steel objects.

Of course, if the “inanimate steel objects” (and, more importantly, the design work that went into them) actually were the problem – well, that’d be an issue, wouldn’t it?

Gussets are steel plates used to reinforce joists or connect girders. Although a three-year study of the problems of the ailing I-35W bridge did not focus attention on the bridge’s gussets, and although the bridge was still in the Mississippi River, it took only a week after the bridge fell for the Bush administration’s secretary of transportation, Mary Peters, to finger the culprits: Gussets.

A week.

Shocking.

Or course, two days after the collapse, Nick Coleman appeared on cable TV to pin the entire blame on Minnesota Republicans, funding, and the gas tax.

Two days.

She was immediately echoed by a private consulting firm hired by the Pawlenty-Molnau administration within hours of the collapse — without public bid. That firm Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates, was hired for $2 million — coincidentally, the cost of a plan for reinforcing the bridge that was rejected by the Minnesota Department of Transportation months before the collapse.

Since Coleman clearly rejects all of that “empirical method” and “engineering” nonsense in favor of “knowing stuff”, I have to wonder if he wrote that graf without even knowing that it’s complete doubletalk? Two million was the price of a plan. A plan that might have planned to address the causes of the collapse (maybe – and we’ll never know from Coleman’s column), but, given that it came up “months before the collapse”, wouldn’t have actually fixed the problem, even had it addressed the actual cause of the collapse – which we don’t yet know!

The Pawlenty administration has been accusing critics of jumping to conclusions about the cause of the collapse because we argue, whatever the physical causes, that there was a dereliction of a public duty to keep bridges standing and bridge users alive.

And – let’s say it together – Pawlenty is right. “Critics” – mainly politically-motivated hacks like Coleman, Elwyn “E-Tink” Tinklenburg and Alice Hausman – were blaming Pawlenty before the last girder had fallen.

If you listen to Minnesota’s officials, it’s almost like the bridge never fell. It couldn’t have. After all, they had a great plan for keeping it up.

On paper.

SCREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEECH

You mean, just like the $2 million “plan” to keep the bridge up that Coleman mentioned not ten paragraphs above?

The one that’s distinguished from the “plan” Coleman now ridicules…why?

This is an illustration of the disconnect between no-tax politics and the real world, where gravity is stronger than wishful thinking.

And actual empirical science is stronger than the wishful thinking of a bitter old hack who wants, more than anything, to capitalize on the Bridge tragedy.

This next bit (emphasis added)…:

Pinpointing the physical cause of the collapse will require long forensic investigation. But CYA is Chapter One in the political playbook, so the pols are clinging to their Grassy Knoll Gusset theory.

…makes me wonder if the entire state can take out a restraining order.

Peters, the federal secretary of transportation, repeated her gusset tale Nov. 1, causing one gob-smacked Republican who heard her, Edina’s Rep. Ron Erhardt, to state the obvious:

If gussets failed, he said, “What is that but a lack of maintenance?”

Exactly.

“Exactly” – in the same way that a faulty premise is a matter of bad copy editing.

Numbnuts “Representative” Erhard and “Writer” Coleman:  if the gusset plate was designed wrong, it wouldn’t matter if it was brand-new off of the palette.  It would have been inadequate from the moment it was welded into place. 

That is not maintenance.

That is design.

That is what we get for electing scientific illiterates – or reading them.

Collapse of Preconceptions

Posted on by
17

Ever since the immediate aftermath of the 35W bridge collapse, a parade of lefty pundits lined up to blame the disaster on lack of state aid to local govenrments, closed libraries, and the war in Iraq for all I remember.

The response – let’s wait until actual engineers investigate this thing.

Well, they’re still investigating.  But according to federal transportation officials, Bthere’s a working theory, and that theory is that Nick Coleman suffered a stroke has, has, so far, nothing to do with money:

The top federal transportation official said that investigators have a “working theory” of why the 35W bridge collapsed in August: a poorly designed metal component called a gusset plate and excessive weight on the bridge that day.

U.S. Transportation Secretary Mary Peters’ comments Thursday mirrored statements she made in August, a week after the collapse, and like her previous comments immediately led to controversy. The National Transportation Safety Board, which is investigating the collapse, has said a formal finding will not be available for at least a year.

Everyone knows this.  But knowing that the investigators have narrowed things down to a short list of theories does help…

…in dealing with this kind of thing:

Sen. Steve Murphy, chairman of the Senate Transportation Committee, said Peters told a gathering Thursday in Washington, D.C., that he attended that “a finding of fault was not going to be lack of inspection or lack of maintenance” by state officials.

“I think it taints the findings,” he said.

No, Senator Murphy.  It taints the spin you and your party want to bring to the upcoming election.

It is all politics to the likes of Murphy.

But a spokesman for Peters said Murphy’s account of her comments was inaccurate.

“What she said is, look, I’m not going to prejudge what the NTSB is going to find, but the working theory that they are operating on, and this has been in the news for about two months now, is that there was a combination of a gusset plate and too much weight placed on a certain part of the bridge,” spokesman Brian Turmail said.

“Certainly, the NTSB would want to look into whether lack of maintenance was a factor in the collapse of the bridge,” he said. But Turmail added that “the working theory at the NTSB is that it is not a lack of inspections, but a design flaw and weight.”

Doesn’t seem all that controversial, does it?

Unless you’re someone for whom the bridge collapse was nothing but political red meat in the first place:

Later Thursday, Rep. Ron Erhardt, R-Edina, confirmed Murphy’s account. “Murphy was sitting behind me and I turned to him and said, ‘What is this?'” Erhardt said. “To hear that it wasn’t maintenance or inspection, I thought, ‘What the hell?’ I remembered early reports about the gussets and I thought, what is that but lack of maintenance?”

I have to sit still for a minute.

I need to breathe slowly.

In.

Out.

In.

Out.

Rep. Erhardt:  If the gusset plates were (as the “working theory” postulates) poorly designed – meaning “not designed to be capable of relieving the stress on the joints that they needed to under the circumstances” – then their maintenance would (under my understanding of the theory) be irrelevant.

If you design a gusset plate (and its attendant bolts and welds, and its interaction with the rest of the structure) to transfer fifty tons of weight from girder A to arch B, and there’s really eighty tons being transferred, it wouldn’t matter if the plate were brand new out of the box; there’d be a problem.

A design problem.

Not a maintenance problem.

The Strib piece – by Patricia Lopez – notes the real importance of this theory. Oh, and it has nothing to do with the bridge falling over:

A design flaw would give administration critics less of an opening to hold current officials at the Minnesota Department of Transportation or Gov. Tim Pawlenty responsible.

And – oh, yeah, just like all of us people who care about science and stuff have been saying all along – it’s not over yet:

“It’s true, yeah, we are looking at the design issues and the gusset plates and the weight of the construction materials and equipment on the bridge,” NTSB spokesman Peter Knudson said. “We’re also looking at the maintenance and repair history. We’re looking at the de-icing fluids — any role they may have played. We basically haven’t ruled anything out yet.”

But you can smell the fear, can’t you?

It’s interesting; for all the yapping the left does about the (caricaturish, cartoon-y parts of the) right’s flailing about with non-issues like evolution and creationism, it’s amazing the contempt the (caricaturish, cartoon-y parts of the) left has for science.

Bridge To Pork!

Posted on by
36

Sue Jeffers over at True North takes Jim Oberstar to task:

In your Tribune Counter Point comments on Oct. 26 you stated it is “unfathomable to not be moved to act decisively” after the tragedy of the bridge collapse. Well, what are you waiting for?

On August 6 President Bush signed your bill to authorize $250 million in emergency transportation aid and $5 million in transit funding assistance to MN for the collapse of the 35W Bridge. MN needs the remaining $195 million promised immediately.  Three months later MN is still waiting for the federal funding while behind the scenes state Democrats continue to play politics with state DOT funding.

Read the whole thing.

And ponder the media’s selective double-standard in covering these things.

Details, Details?

Posted on by
Reply

Nick Coleman is a monkey for the local chamber of commerce.

He notes (at the behest of local car dealers) that Flatiron – the company building the new 35W River Bridge – has bought a bunch of new trucks.

In Colorado.  With Colorado registrations.

A Flatiron spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment, but permit me to sum up the situation here: Buying Colorado trucks for a high-profile project in Minnesota that still carries the emotional pangs of death and destruction? Dumb, Flatiron.

This is a company that was judged to have better public “outreach” than the local firms that lost out on the project, despite submitting lower bids. Would a Minnesota company buy a shiny new fleet for the project from, say, Colorado?

Depending on Minnesota’s business tax laws, or conditions of one deal or another the Minnesota company had cut with taxpayers?

I mean, the short answer is this; I have no idea why they’d buy and register their new fleet of trucks in Colorado.  One might think that there must be some state tax-related reason to buy trucks there, in their home state and the state in which they are incorporated, rather than here.

And, by the way, while the bridge collapse was indeed an emotional cataclysm for Minnesota, I don’t care if the engineers and ironworkers involved in the reconstruction share those emotions or not.  Indeed, I’d just as soon they kept emotion out of things.

Go Ask Alice, When She’s Ten Feet Tall

Posted on by
16

I’m amusing myself at the moment by pondering this question: How would Lori Sturdevant describe a leader among conservatives, one who was unswerving in his devotion to conservative first principles and in their forwarding in the Legislature?  Someone like, say, Michele Bachmann or Phil Krinkie were, when they were in the State Senate?  Or like Marty Seifert is today?  I’m guessing words like “divisive” and “extremist” would pop up.

Just a hunch.

Naturally – being a DFL hack in all but name – Sturdevant can be expected to provide the same treatement to their opposite numbers in the DFL – if you’re in opposite world. 

So she shows, in yesterday’s column featuring my “represenative”, Alice “The Phantom” Hausman:

When state Rep. Alice Hausman of St. Paul rises to speak on the House floor, I’ve noticed, chatter quiets and paper rustling stops. 

If the chatterers and rustlers live in District 66B, they’re probably amazed to see that she actually exists.  Hausmann is not known for returning phone calls, or for that matter being seen around the district, unless there’s a photo op.   

Oh, but Lori thinks she’s just dreamy:

She commands attention — never with bombast, but with the calm, collected reason of the Kansas farm girl, former teacher, Lutheran minister’s wife and 10-term legislator that she is.

It was said after a closed House DFL caucus meeting on Sept. 11 that when Hausman vented her frustration about legislative unproductivity, a hush fell.

“We just moved through this time of crisis,” Hausman said not long afterward, “and we didn’t do a thing. … People are fed up with us.”

Heh.

A freeway bridge fell, and the state still can’t find a way to invest more in transportation, she lamented.

Actually, she “lamented” that the state wasn’t investing in a hell of a lot of things; the bridge was just a handy cover.

 Property taxes are spiking — especially in her St. Paul district — and there’s no boost in state aid for cities. The Legislature will help rebuild flooded southeastern Minnesota, but it couldn’t pass a bonding bill to meet other infrastructure needs.

Unmentioned by Sturdevant (presumably because it’d make her hagiography of Hausmann less…hagiographic; the bonding bill failed because Hausmann tried to use it to float a raft of DFL pork into the budget, and Local Aid to Cities is nothing but a subsidy of Hausmann’s and the DFL’s failed urban policy that is best amputated.

Hausman heads the House Capital Investment Finance Division — the bonding panel. That should give her a lot of say about broken bridges, stalled traffic, polluted water and the like.

It should — but too often, she said, it has not. Too many decisions, bonding and otherwise, have been left to a discordant trio — the Republican governor, the Senate DFL majority leader and the House DFL speaker.

That must change, Hausman said. “The day of three leaders sitting in a room making decisions for us is over,” she said.

We will not let gridlock between three leaders be the defining point of government in Minnesota. We all represent our constituents. We don’t represent our leaders.”

Interesting, isn’t it, that Sturdevant presents Hausmann’s statement in its full populist glory, without noting that that is exactly what Governor Pawlenty is doing.  Representing his constituents; the majority in Minnesota, the one that elected him and his tax-hawk platform. 

So it’s fair for Hausman, but not fair for Pawlenty?

(Just a rhetorical question.  We all know the answer…)

The column gets worse. 

You’ve been warned.

Schwoops

Posted on by
7

A while ago, I wrote about the City Pages – the Twin Cities’ “alternative” freebie ‘zine – and their front-page article about the 35W Bridge Collapse.  I said that…:

 …”last week’s City Pages did a long, meandering, utterly speculative assignment of blame to everyone from the Governor to David Strom.  Absent from Anderson and Demko’s list:  “The design of the bridge itself”.

Former City-Pager Mike Mosedale emailed me:

That is incorrect. If you read the story, you will see there is a full section devoted to the subject.
Here is one relevant snippet:

“Even though it’s early in the investigation, the National Transportation Safety Board is already raising questions about the bridge’s design. One issue of concern: the bridge didn’t have any piers built into the riverbed. It also lacked what are commonly referred to as “engineering redundancies”—back-up support built into the system to minimize damage if one part fails. Last week, the NTSB and Federal Highway Authority focused on so-called gusset plates, steel sheets that connected the bridge’s girders together. The inspectors said the plates may have been a design flaw.”
 
I’m not interested in participating in your comment scrum, but I do think you should post a correction or apology.

Well, it goes to show you that I don’t read the City Pages as closely as I once did. 

But I apologize:  I missed the article’s brief nod to empirical fairness amid the pages of speculative, politicized witchhunting.  My bad. 

Because goodness knows how important it is to check one’s facts.

Darkness For Darkness

Posted on by
1

Kerry from Smoothing Plane has the same reaction to the term “closure” that I do; it’s terribly overused, and totally wrong.

Especially as the last bodies are recovered from the Mississippi:

“Families will get closure…”, “Closure…”, “Another body pulled….closure”. Will billboards be pulled onto the roofs of buildings, “Got closure?”…? Relatives and families of the dead will not get closure; they will learn what happened to their missing father, son, mother or daughter. The palpable empty nothing of not knowing will untangle into dense, light cannot escape its gravity grief…All language less than rituals of grief for the dead shame and banish grief, as if it were some drooling cripple, muttering shattered curses, from whom we look away, masquerading the stone in the stomach.

I don’t know what kind of traffic Kerry Hogan gets, but he should get more. 

UPDATE:  The last body was found just after I wrote this.  May God – or the Great Spirit or Karma or random physiology or whatever you choose to believe in – bring peace to the families. 

Logic, Predictions

Posted on by
2

Over the weekend, the Strib seemed to all but declare “low taxes” the culprit behind the bridge collapse.

Mitch “The Other Mitch” Pearlstein writes for the Center of the American Experiment:

But for any connection to hold, at least one of the following conditions would have to be true, when not a single one is.

It would have to be demonstrated, for instance, that decisions by the Minnesota Department of Transportation about what to do about the bridge — whether to repair it, how to repair it, when to repair it — were made on the basis of what such steps might cost. But I know of no evidence that money played any role in determining what state officials or anyone else did or didn’t do in maintaining the bridge.

Likewise, to draw any suspect connection between the collapse and the consistent preference of large numbers of Minnesotans to hold the line on taxes, one would have to assume that inspectors and other officials charged with protecting and serving allowed anything other than their professionalism to determine how they gauged the sturdiness and fragility of the state’s infrastructure. Without a morsel of evidence that any of them compromised their integrity, it’s slanderous to imply that any of them did.

And then, of course, even if Pawlenty broke his no-tax pledge 20 minutes after taking office in 2003, and even if MnDOT’s budget doubled in a single bound, does anyone really believe that federal, state and local bureaucracies would have moved fast enough so that anything other than maybe talking about a new 35W bridge would have happened by now?

Oh, and I have a fearless prediction; last week’s City Pages did a long, meandering, utterly speculative assignment of blame to everyone from the Governor to David Strom.  Absent from Anderson and Demko’s list:  “The design of the bridge itself”. 

That’s where my money is…

Postcards From Bedlam and Jackson

Posted on by
2

If there’s a Minnesota politics “expert” whose shelf-life is more expired than Larry Jacobs, the U of M PoliSci prof who is cited in virtually every story about politics (or so it seems) in the Minnesota mainstream media, it’s gotta be Wy Spano.  Spano turns up everywhere, on every panel (or, again, so it seems), doing for panel discussions what Lori Sturdevant does for the Columns page; gurgitating DFL talking points.

Which would be one thing if he weren’t an intellectual thug…

…well, let’s let Margaret take over the story over at Anti-Strib:

David did the political panel on Almanac this past Friday. If you didn’t see it, the panel had most of the usual suspects: Ember Reichgott-Junge, Fritz Knaacht, Wy Spano and David. The panel quickly devolved into Wy vs. David, with Wy trying to make the argument that the bridge collapsed because maintenance was underfunded and the Taxpayers League (David and his rich friends) had ruined the state. Wy spouted that the no longer were Minnesotans going to believe the Taxpayers League and that basically the bridge collapse showed that the battle was over and conservative arguments had lost. The on-camera debate continued largely civilly although Wy continued to butt in and talk over David, but that’s his style so nothing really new there. What the viewers didn’t really see what the shouting match that developed after the segment was over. Interestingly, neither the producers, nor Erik Eskola told them to shut up, except for an initial “quiet on the set” when Cathy Wurzer began the index file question segment. There was shouting and hand waving so loud that I, sitting on the bleachers couldn’t hear the question (a weekly bit of Minnesota trivia for those of you who never watch the show). Cathy was clearly distracted and you can see an occasional silhouette moving around behind the strategically placed vase full of sunflowers.

I will have to summarize the “discussion” that took place after the cameras stopped rolling because there was a lot of noise. David pointed out that the Stillwater Bridge is in worse shape than the I-35W bridge was and Wy started shouting that David was a “liar” and a “know nothing” and that the “know nothings had been winning” but now “they” were going to take back the state.” It was quite the scene, reminiscent of Nikita’s Kruschev’s “we will bury you” speech. Or the Wellstone memorial.

They apparently think everyone will be deaf before the engineers finally come out and say the bridge collapsed due to things that wouldn’t have been affected by any more spending. 

It may be their only hope, in fact.

UPDATE:  In my haste, I missed the link the first time. 

Where Credit Is Due

Posted on by
5

Here’s how the media world has turned around in the past twenty years; when I worked for Hubbard Broadcasting, from 1985 to 1987, it was a big honkin’ player in the local media scene, with a market value of around $400 million dollars.

Today, Hubbard is valued around a billion dollars – and is a “ma and pa shop” in the great media scheme of things.

Their flagship TV station, Channel 5, has taken its ratings lumps – but it’d seem they’ve done something right.  They were pretty universally acclaimed as having the best coverage of the bridge collapse last week.

Sarah Janecek, writing last  week, sums up the plaudits:

KSTP TV started reporting on the bridge in its Wednesday six p.m. newscast with the first live chopper shot at 6:22. The station stayed on the air covering the story live for the next 25 hours straight. I cannot begin to calculate what that cost. Never mind the costs of the employee overtime, or the expense of keeping helicopters live in the air for 13 hours straight, there were no commercials. None. The first commercial break was a short one during last night’s ten p.m. newscast.

Old man Hubbard, himself, was in the news room Wednesday night, observing his hard working news team. At no time was cost an issue in terms of coverage. He just let his team run, and run, they did.

Janecek also be-kudoes the local citizen journalist community.  Check it out.

It’s Too Early To Say…

Posted on by
13

…because unlike certain over-the-hill Metro columnists, I’m not going to pretend to be an engineer, but…

Engineers think they might have possibly found egg on Nick Coleman, Elwyn Tinklenburg, Alice Hausman, Amy Klobuchar and Wreck Chupke’s faces a possible clue as to what might have brought down the 35W River Bridge:

Opening a new window into last week’s fatal bridge collapse, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) said that one of its areas of inquiry involves the design of steel connecting plates known as gusset plates; the material makeup of those plates; and the loads and stresses they bore.

Hours later, Secretary of Transportation Mary Peters said the NTSB indicated that the stress on the bridge’s gusset plates may have been a factor in the bridge collapse and that one possible stress may have been the weight of construction equipment and materials on the bridge.

A mistake on the drawing board?

Wow – that would have nothing to do with the gas tax, would it?

Again – it’s way too soon to tell; this is nowhere close to a conclusion.

But if it is, Nick Coleman is going to have some ‘splainin’ to do.

Premature Capitulation

Posted on by
5

The groundswell is growing; Minnesotans don’t want the DFL to hijack last week’s tragedy to ram through a shopping list of their pork projects.

Image 

57% of Minnesotans aren’t buying it.  I’ve heard some lefties respond to this poll “of course people oppose a new tax; you need to ask them what the tax is for!”   Perhaps – but then, I suspect nobody will ask the citizens of this state what they really want out of a “special session”, either;

Leo “Psychmeister” Pusatieri issues the call (I add the emphases):

There appears to be a substantial number of Republican lawmakers who are seeing the call for raising the state gas tax to be what it is– an opportunistic ploy by DFL lawmakers to ramrod a political agenda by exploiting a tragedy that had absolutely nothing to do with either the presence of or absence of a tax increase. While they certainly see the need to prioritize and ensure the safety of bridges and other infrastructure, they are likewise acknowledging that the answer lies not in an additional burden on Minnesota taxpayers, but rather on a good, old-fashioned prioritization of allocation of resources.

The bottom line is that neither a special session nor a tax increase is required to prevent what happened on the I-35 W bridge from happening elsewhere.

A phone call or email (Pawlenty@state.mn.us) to Governor Pawlenty’s office will go a long way toward ensuring that the solution to the bridge and infrastructure issue is a prudent, effective measure, rather than a knee-jerk tax-and-spend reaction.

There’s your links.  Get on it.

Leo also points us to essential posts on the subject from:

  • Strom: “I see a backlash coming, a la Wellstone Memorial”
  • Gross:  “this poll clearly indicates that people want to see a solution-oriented legislature. They want to drive across safe bridges. This isn’t a poll that says we can afford inaction. This is a great opportunity for Gov. Pawlenty and the House GOP leadership to show Minnesotans their common sense approach to solving problems.”
  • Aplikowski:  “it is almost like the people who support the currently elected crop in St. Paul (and lash out at those of us who disagree with and question their authority) are completely out of touch with the reality of Minnesotans.”
  • Gary Miller: “Raising taxes would be nothing short of admitting complicity in the 35W tragedy.  How this fact is lost of the Governor, who has left the door open to a gas tax increase, defies credulity”
  • Michael Brodkorb: “Of the 38% that support a gas tax increase, 47% think it should be raised less than 5 cents.”

Read ’em all.

But call or email the governor first.

What An Editor Could Do

Posted on by
Reply

Like most MOB blogs, I’ve made a bit of a sub-career of ripping on the hapless Nick Coleman. 

Last week’s two vile, politicized, uninformed, illiterate, hateful columns about the bridge collapse (1 and 2) were the nadir of a career with very few high points. 

But Roosh – from RooshFive – shows what would be possible, if Coleman’s editors merely trusted him less and forced him to take some input (or cut the crap and replaced Coleman).

It ends…:

All the more reason to find ourselves reassured and in awe, and so proud of the heroes of late – both professional and civilian, that have shown our entire country how great a place the Twin Cities of Minnesota are to live and work

…but you should read the whole thing.

Fearless Predictions

Posted on by
4

Number 1:  When the engineers finally release their report about what actually caused the 35W Bridge Collapse, a lot of regional lefties – Elwyn Tinklenberg, Rep. Alice Hausman, Nick Coleman and others among them – are going to owe the Governor, Lt. Gov/Transportation Commissioner Molnau, the Taxpayers’ League and the “hold the line on taxes” crowd – a lot of apologies for a lot of defamation.

Number 2: None of them will actually give those apologies.

That is all.

We’ll check back on this when the report comes back…

The Case For Rabies

Posted on by
Reply

King smacks a bad puppy:

My contention thus far is that dogs use explanations to give their readers the impression that they know that which they cannot yet really know. Attempting to connect dots of a rare event at this stage is highly premature.

The puppy – the not-exceptionally-astute author of the City Pages’ “Best Leftyblog of 2006” (see: “Damnation by Faint Praise”) “Cucking Stool” – took a thwack at King’s economic analysis of the Bridge collapse. 

Read the whole thing.  Ask yourself “have I checked my tire pressure since I got to work?”  Then send the whole thing to Nick Coleman.

So It Wasn’t the “No New Taxes” Thing?

Posted on by
17

Phred Phelps knows what caused the 35W Bridge to collapse…:

The Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kan., plans to stage protests at funerals of victims of the 35W bridge collapse to state that God made the bridge fall because he hates America, and especially Minnesota, because of its tolerance of homosexuality.

Oh, Phelps is coming to Minnesota.

In a press release issued the day after the bridge collapse, the church called for protests at the funerals and outlined its feelings about the relationship between God’s plan and the sins of Minneapolis and Minnesota, which it calls the “land of the Sodomite damned.”

If any Patriot Riders are involved in this and are organizing anything, please drop me a line. 

UPDATE:  D’oh!  The Patriot Riders won’t be showing up; they exist to honor veterans.

Fair enough.

Anyone else?

It’s A Small World After All

Posted on by
Reply

Last week, I joined a ton of MOB blogs in bringing you Sisyphus’ eyewitness account of the bridge collapse.

Yesterday, I heard from a friend of mine in New York (not Angryclown, for those of you who keep track of these things) who had an old fraternity brother on the same boat, who managed to liveblog the whole thing (scroll down to August 1)…

…and who would seem to be a co-worker of Sisyphus’.  And, as it happens, someone I’ve met.

Mikey gets the “immediacy” award, while Sisyphus has the narrative. 

Some Collapse. Others Burn.

Posted on by
19

I’ve been collecting emails and other material about the chronic mess that is the Minnesota Department of Transportation.  There’ll be a much bigger post on this issue later on this week.

In the meantime, Sarah Janecek starts digging into the rathole:

The bridge collapse–in what’s sure to be an excruciatingly painful process–will put the spotlight on what anyone who has worked in Minnesota transportation policy has known for decades: the Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT) is a mess. No one administration or political party is to blame. The Rudy Perpich (DFL) Administration (1982-1990), the Arne Carlson (R) Administration (1990-1998), the Jesse Ventura (I) Administration (1998-2002) and the Tim Pawlenty (R) Administration (2002-to present) have all made the same call. There are other, sexier things to fund rather than existing infrastructure and that’s what’s happened.

That, as they say, is just the beginning. 

Read the whole thing.

In other Bridge-related news, Wog has some theories about the collapse.  Some make you go “hmm”, some make you go “hmph”, and all of them are better than anything Nick Coleman’s come up with…

Where Their Mouths Are

Posted on by
2

Dunwoody – a Minneapolis private technical school – offers a huge reward to one of last week’s heroes:

If school bus evacuator Jeremy Hernandez wants to resume learning auto mechanics at Dunwoody College of Technology, he can do so without charge.

The Minneapolis school made that offer to Hernandez’s family Saturday

School spokesman Dave Jarzyna said the school was bombarded with phone calls from the public, after word got out that Hernandez couldn’t afford to continue attending.

“Universally they said we need to do something for this guy,” Jarzyna said.

“We’re going to make sure that if he wants to come to Dunwoody, he’ll have the resources to do that,” Jarzyna said. Hernanedez, 20, could not be reached immediately for comment.

“The ball’s in his court and we’re hoping to hear from him,” Jarzyna said.

Of course, this sort of thing is great PR for Dunwoody; it warms up a spot in the press’ and public’s hearts for the place.

Just like now. 

Well played, to all concerned…

UPDATE:  Ed notes that you can contribute to Dunwoody’s scholarship program here.  It’d be a great way to say “thanks” for saying thanks.

Too Loathsome To Loathe. But I’ll Try.

Posted on by
29

Michael Brodkorb said it best in his headline:  PAWLENTY HATER NICK COLEMAN HITS NEW LOW.

First came his first, deeply stupid column on Friday, which blamed the “No New Taxes” pledge for the disaster as rescuers were still frantically combing the wreckage for survivors, roughly 12 18 months before the NTSB actually expects to know what actually happened.

Then, his – I’ll be charitable – scabrous and incoherent appearance on MSNBC.

And now, Saturday’s column, an apologia for the politicizing of this tragedy, and an attempt to seize “moral authority” on behalf of the likes of Coleman – fact-free politically-motivated ranters – from people who actually stayed awake in math class, went to engineering instead of J school, and actually have to deal in facts and science for a living.

The column distills everything that make Nick Coleman America’s worst working columnist into a melange of gutless lying that is almost too depressing to fisk; indeed, I’ve almost given up critiqueing Coleman, since under normal circumstances he’s become an irrelevant self-parody.

But people are dead, and this – I’m done being charitable – gutless illiterate habitual-liar political hack is trying to use this catastrophe to bully the ill-informed into accepting his deeply, abidingly stupid politics.

According to the pundits, the president’s response to the disaster at our end of the Mississippi is an effort to be seen as more compassionate than he appeared in 2005, when he just looked out the window of Air Force One after the levees broke in New Orleans.

Minnesotans will welcome the president. We need presidents to be comforters, and leaders, at times such as this…But let’s not pretend his visit isn’t all about politics, too.

Everything about this disaster — except the heroic efforts to rescue and recover the victims — has been steeped in politics. And the most calculated political effort has been the posturing and spinning by public officials trying to act commanding while making sure they don’t get pinned with responsibility for the collapse.

Alternate – and as it happens, factual – explanation:  They’re working their asses off to get ahead of the lies that people like Nick Coleman are telling about the situation; lies that are contradicted in Coleman’s own paper; lies that can only be aimed at swaying the gullible and ill-informed (i.e., Nick Coleman’s entire audience) into taking a desired action at the polls.

If you think everyone should play nice about it, you are living in Pollyanna Land. We are in a bare-knuckled political brawl in this country, and the government is in the hands of government haters who want to starve it or, in the alleged belief of presidential ally Grover Norquist, want to “drown it.”

You can’t drown government. It is people who drown.

Again, Coleman lies.  Not only does nobody this side of Ron Paul seriously discuss dismantling government, but one of the things tha so irritated wahabbi-DFLers like Coleman before this tragedy was their “myopic” focus on…roads and bridges, as opposed to boondoggles like the Ventura Trolley.

Friday, the Taxpayers League — the heart of the No New Taxes beast — called on us not to point fingers. They probably disconnected their phone and took down their sign, too.

Actually, sources tell me they were inundated with hateful calls, likely as not from people inflamed by ignorant  moral vermin like Nick Coleman.  Unlike Nick Coleman, the Taxpayers League took the phone calls, and responded.  Try calling Nick Coleman sometimes; he may sound like a stroke victim (no offense to stroke victims or, for that matter, vermin), but he can sure dish out the verbal abuse.  I have the voicemail tapes to prove it.

No New Taxes is not a slogan that works anymore.

We wouldn’t know, would we?  Remember – this bridge was first drawing red flags under the Moe Ventura Administration, when the DFL was spending the surplus like a crack whore with a stolen Gold Card.

That means don’t blame the people in charge for letting 140,000 vehicles a day — 1.7 every second –cross a bridge that wasn’t fit for traffic.

And again, Coleman is not just a gutless, cynical liar, but an illiterate, ignorant one too.  He repeats the lie that the “50” rating implied a “50-50” chance that the bridge was going to collapse, or that it wasn’t fit to be driven on.  His own paper iterated that, in fact, it was a rating; a rating that caused a response (more inspections, more scrutiny, and a focus on the year 2020, when the bridge was scheduled for major reconstruction or repair).  These were decisions made by engineers, people who deal in fact, calculation and empirical conclusions.  The opposite of Nick Coleman.

No one knew it might fall? Give us a break. What do you need? They were talking about bolting plates on it to keep it up. Maybe duct tape was next.

Nick, you lying, illiterate numbnuts:  You state this (“bolting plates”) like it’s some kind of anomaly.  That’s how you maintain bridges – indeed, any big steel-girder construction – when you have neither the option nor the need to take the whole shebang out of service.

And, in the opinion of engineers who do this for a living and for whom it is a matter of empirical science rather than ill-informed opinion, they didn’t need to take it out of service.

If they were wrong, it was not a matter of insufficient money.

The rest of Coleman’s paper doesn’t seem to have a problem getting that fact out there.

Why does Coleman?

Bottom line: It fell.

At least he got one fact right.

Is it political to be angry about that? So be it. Everything is politics. Politics is not a dirty word by itself. Politics builds bridges and schools and hospitals. And politics can make them fall down.

Catch that?

It sums up the problem with people like Nick Coleman.  “Politics” doesn’t “build” anything.  It decides how things like taxes are gathered, and how government budgets are spent.  Since we live in a “democracy”, that process is going to be bumptious and imperfect.  Perhaps Coleman would prefer a dictatorship?

But politics doesn’t build anything; engineers, ironworkers, carpenters and masons do.

And barring the odd war here and there, it doesn’t “destroy” anything either:  wear and tear does.  Time does.  “Acts of God” do.  Traffic does.  Design flaws and construction errors and undetected flaws in material do.   More often, confluences of all of the above do; the Titanic wasn’t sunk by an iceberg or a design shortcoming (un-capped watertight compartments) or faulty assumptions (that only three compartments would vent to the sea) or misplaced arrogance (doing flank speed at night in an ice field); it was the combination of all of them that doomed the ship.

Likewise, it’s every bit as likely that some combination of material flaws or deterioration combined with decades of heavy use and occasional abuse, construction practices, heat, weight of traffic, and undetected material faults caused this catastrophe as it was the nonexistant “lack of money”.

When Pawlenty vetoed the transportation bill in May, “Commissioner” Molnau was beside him, smiling. Dear, Minnesota. A transportation commissioner who grins while her department is being knifed is not a transportation commissioner.

Could we please follow this logic into the newsroom?  A “journalist” who makes s**t up as he goes along isn’t a “journalist”.

Now, a bridge has fallen and people are dead. The buck has to stop somewhere. Molnau was in China when it happened. She probably kissed the Minnesota turf when she got back. Because a Chinese transportation commissioner whose bridge collapsed might lose her head.

And a columnist who gang-rapes fact to chase a further his politics should certainly not be working in a town that values “fact”.

Jay Reding also guts Coleman like a fish.

The Bridge: Counting On A Miracle

Posted on by
1

I remember late in the afternoon on 9/11, talking with my pal and neighbor Flash at the end of America’s longest day in two generations.  He glumly predicted 20,000 dead.  I was more “optimistic”; given it was New York, I figured thousands would be late to the office, stuck in the subway, whatever.  I looked at the bright side, and figured 15,000 dead. 

Both of us, along with millions of other Americans, were astounded, and thankful to be very wrong.

I had the same reaction last week.

———-

I’m always gratefully astounded by two things;  humans’ ability to survive, and the average person’s ability to rise to the occasion, no matter what the occasion is, and how confounding the “experts” continuously find that to be.

Not everyone accepts human resiliance and intelligence as a given, of course.  Reading official disaster-planning documents, it’s fairly clear that officialdom thinks the average citizen is a helpless sheeple, unable to deal with, much less react to, crisis without government “experts” on hand to do their thinking for them.  While that’s mostly a high level phenomenon, it extends down to all-too-many “first responders” as well, although I like to think they’re in the minority. 

The fact is that, in every major disaster in which people were cut off from “authorities” and “experts”, the average American is perfectly capable of reacting appropriately to the situation.  Examples range far and wide; from the appropriate reactions of thousands of individual carry permit holders who’ve thwarted crime without inflicting carnage (confounding many prominent lefties, confirming most conservatives’ beliefs) to the people in the Twin Towers who, on 9/11, managed to convince themselves to ignore the announcements telling them to stay in their offices and await rescule, to organize themselves, and to get themselves to safety in an orderly evacuation that bordered on the miraculous, to the “kids” on that schoolbus, perched on the edge of the abyss last Wednesday, who stepped up and got their charges to safety without the aid of anyone with a badge.

And while after every catastrophe, the “experts” quickly give up hope of finding survivors in, say, buried rubble within three days of the disaster, nearly every such declaration, it seems, is followed by a story of someone being pulled, alive, from the rubble days later, after surviving on runoff and hope for an impossible time.

As I watched and heard the initial news coverage of the 35W Bridge collapse last week – with stories of dozens of cars in the water, memories of sitting in eight lanes of stopped traffic on the deck in mind, and the jagged concrete and flames front and center – I and most everyone I knew silently braced for dozens and dozens of dead. 

Humans’ sometimes-miraculous resiliency – aided by some fortuitous physics – stepped in.  Thank God:

Although the final death toll is still unknown, doctors and safety experts say that a combination of factors, from physics to shock absorbers, probably helped cushion the blow for those plunging from the bridge in their vehicles.

In general, they say, the cars and the bridge itself helped absorb some of the impact that would have killed someone free-falling from that height.

“I would say over two-thirds of the people walked away,” said Dr. Marc Conterato, an emergency room physician at North Memorial Medical Center in Robbinsdale, who was at the site. “Believe me, the human body can absorb a lot of trauma.”

Watching the immense cloud of spray and spume thrown up by the falling structure, falling 20-30 feet below the plummeting roadbed, gives you some clue; the web of girders sluicing into the water and then plowing into the riverbed surely absorbed a lot of the impact; the flat roadbed beneath many of the cars must have spread out the energy of the impact over a large enough area to make things more survivable than they appeared at first glance – not just to us gathered around our TVs, but to the experts as well:

“I figured we’d probably have a couple of hundred injured, and 25 or 50 fatalities,” said Dr. John Hick, an emergency doctor and disaster coordinator at Hennepin County Medical Center.

I don’t think anyone minds being wrong about that.