Last weekend, JRoosh greeted the news of the NTSB’s draft report on the 35W Bridge collapse appropriately, noting that – at least in the context of the chorus of recrimination that the likes of E-Tink and Alice “The Phantom” Hausman and Margaret Kelliher and Nick Coleman dumped on him – the Governor was exonerated.

When Jeff Rosenberg at The Daily Liberal noted that Sporty the Dog from Clicking Stool had “taken Roosh to task” over his piece, naturally, I had to check it out.

As with most leftybloggers attempts to discuss history, engineering and other more-or-less empirical subjects, it was a big mistake.

Leftybloggers, like the political and media leaders whose shrieking points so many of them so unthinkingly ape, aren’t big on getting context right.  Sporty tries to frame the issue in the form of a doctor’s visit, and concludes:

The article in the Strib that J refers to is in the paper today. The headline? I-35W bridge was doomed from the start. It was a design defect!

We are, of course, all doomed from the start. But that doesn’t means we don’t get physicals, submit to humiliating examinations, and pay the medical profession to try to keep us healthy.

In the case of the bridge, the Pawlenty administration also fingered the whopper, got the test results, and opted for the cosmetic solution.

Except that there was no “doctor’s visit” saying that the bridge, as in Sporty’s example, was terminally ill.  To run with the (bad, misplaced) metaphor, there were merely checkups, telling the bridge, like a lot of 40-year-olds, that it was crumbling around the edges a bit; that the wear and tear of daily stress was taking its toll.  The bridge at 40 was doing better than some other bridges – MNDoT rated the Cayuga and Lafayette bridges, among others in the metro, much worse as of July 31, 2007, much more likely to die younger than the 35W bridge.  Not that it was especially more terminally ill than any other bridge of its age. 

The fact is, nobody knew 40 years ago – or two years ago, for that matter – that the bridge was suffering from anything much worse than…being a 40 year old bridge.  Yes, there were concerns – rusty gussets, suspect piers, etc.  But the thing that killed it – mistakes in engineering calculations?  That was a bolt from the blue – an undetected aneurism or clot or stroke that could have been found, maybe, given one of two things:

• A degree of dedication to checking and re-checking design assumptions, calculations and material specs from every potentially suspect bridge in the state (read:  every bridge in the state), aggressively trying to predict the unpredictable.
• Clairvoyance.

Going back and checking over all of those designs, all of their engineering and data – especially those made in the era before all of these things were done electronically – would be analogous to spending every morning for months at a time at the doctor’s office, getting prodded and poked and having latex-clad fingers shoved hither and yon by a staff of doctors dedicated to eradicating every possible “what if” in your physiology – and it’d be about as proportionally expensive.

As far as clairvoyance goes – if government could manage that, would our mortgage system be in the mess it’s in today?

To have done something about the 35W bridge’s problems, there would have had to have been a huge effort to go back and re-examine the design of every element of the construction of these bridges; the calculations behind the design of each structural member (hundreds or thousands for each structure), their material specs and various rates of deterioration – all of which, by the way, requires a LOT of reconstructive research, since the original calculations and material specs may or may not be available.  It’d be the equivalent of having a squad of doctors trying to rule out every possible malady you could have.

Think your HMO would cover that?

This hideously expensive process, by the way, would take a LOT of money away from every political body’s main goal in transportation spending; building monuments to the perspicacity of the politicans authorizing the spending. Building trains sends tingles up DFLers legs; lane miles do the same for Republicans. Watching hordes of engineers poring over moldy blueprints and Material Data sheets is no monument to anyone.  It’s just maintenance.

The conclusion?  Well, other than “never pay attention to leftybloggers when they try to talk history, science, engineering, or…well, really, anything”, I guess it’s this…

…well, no.  That kinda covered it.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Tuesday, October 28th, 2008 at 8:00 am and is filed under Blogs, Bridge Collapse, Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.