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…<\/p>\n
…um…<\/p>\n
…well, anyway.<\/p>\n
The point being that even though the latest news on the Bridge Collapse investigation<\/a> – 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:<\/a><\/p>\n Get ready to be gusseted.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Let’s stop right there.<\/p>\n Has Nick Coleman learned nothing <\/em>from years of having his neologisms thrown back in his face wrapped in ridicule?<\/p>\n 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Of course, if the “inanimate steel objects” (and, more importantly, the design work that went into them) actually were <\/em>the problem – well, that’d be an issue, wouldn’t it?<\/p>\n 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n A week.<\/p>\n Shocking.<\/p>\n