Right In The Gussets

The last time Nick “The Monkey” Coleman talked about gusset plates, he was tittering like a schoolgirl (I add some emphasis):

Get ready to be gusseted…I doubt that many Minnesotans heard of gussets before Aug. 1…“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?…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.

The mockery oozes through Coleman’s writing; you can practically hear his thought process creaking away:  “GUSsets!  That sounds FUNny.  Sounds like something a Buh-LOGG-er would think up.  Damg WINGnuts“.

Well, he was wrong.  We were right.  And Coleman has, apparently, been “gusseted”.

So badly gusseted was he that he gussets logic even worse than usual!:

The head of the National Transportation Safety Board says inspections of the Interstate 35W bridge would not have found flaws in the design of the bridge, which opened in 1967. Such inspections would not have learned if Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone or whether the moon is made of green cheese, either.

Ooh, can I play?

“But then, raising the gas tax wouldn’t have copped Oswald, cheesopsied the moon or raised the Titanic!”

Maybe I can be a “Metro Columnist”.

So NTSB board chairman Mark Rosenker was disingenuous, at best, when he said “routine” inspections would not have found a flaw in the bridge gussets that the NTSB is blaming for the collapse. “Routine?”

There was nothing “routine” about the bridge, including its inspections. It had so many problems that it was the most-inspected bridge in Minnesota and engineers were openly worried (according to a story in this paper Aug. 19) about the dangers of a collapse.

That nobody – nobody! – proof-reads Coleman’s material is a matter of record.  But I wonder – does Coleman even read his own stuff after he types it?

The fact that MNDoT recognized the bridge’s issues – “Worried” about it – to the point where it became the most inspected bridge in Minnesota means that the response was routine.

The question isn’t whether the original designers were distracted by thoughts of Marilyn Monroe as they were planning the bridge. The question is why wasn’t the bridge closed, or fixed, by those in charge now?

Because nobody knew the gussets were inadequate enough to topple the bridge.  Corrosion is a fact of life in steel structures, and piers are just as prone to tilting as foundations are to settling after 40 years. 

But the gussets are a godsend to officials who want the public to believe they had no idea the bridge was in jeopardy and there was nothing that could have been done about it.

Neither statement is true.

Right – presuming that any indication existed that the gussets were inadequate for the job. 

Which, as it happens, seems – at this point – to be inconveniently nonexistant.

The gussets are Minnesota’s O Ring. When the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded in 1986, the flaw was a gasket called an O ring that failed in cold temperatures. But the O ring problem was known to the officials who crossed their fingers and launched the shuttle.

The O ring didn’t decide to launch itself, and the bridge didn’t decide to stay open to traffic, despite its many flaws.

The difference – because Coleman either chooses not to explain it, or because he doesn’t know any better (place your bets) was that while Morton-Thiokol – the company that designed and built the O-rings on the Challenger – left documentary evidence that they knew the O-rings could contract outside of tolerances during cold weather, there is no documentary evidence (available to the public, at any rate) that the bridge’s designers had the foggiest clue that their gusset plates were inadequate to the job. 

To be able to explain the difference would be the mark of a good journalist…

…so let’s just move on.

But the present administration is in the hands of a political philosophy that has not been willing to invest enough in the future while leaning, too heavily, on what was built in the past.

So for Nick’s benefit, let’s indulge in some alternate history.

Let’s say Skip Humphrey was elected governor in 1998, and turned the show over to Mike Hatch in ’06, and just for kicks, let’s say they governed from 2002 on with Tic supermajorities in both houses.  Let’s assume (safely) that they jacked up taxes, and that they then went on to:

  1. anticipate that infrastructure repair was their top priority (we’re being wildly hypothetical, here), and…
  2. …until that long, unglamorous job was done, they would resist the politican’s great siren song, to build monuments to their own wisdom by wasteing any more money on mass transit (again, really going out on a limb) and…
  3. …in a feat of Kreskin-like prediction, someone at MNDoT knew that they needed to measure all of the gusset plates on the state’s bridges, re-checking forty-year-old calculations and material spec work from long-retired engineers against real-life deterioration and changes in assumptions, on the off-chance that such a project would come up with forty-year-old errors?

Then, if all  of those assumptions were met, there would have been a chance of predicting the disaster. 

Any action on that bet?

Blaming the collapse on design errors made by people who are gone from the scene does not go far enough in finding responsibility for an avoidable tragedy.

No.  It doesn’t go far enough in hunting the witches Nick Coleman wants to find.

The fallout from Aug. 1 is far from over. And Tuesday’s NTSB report won’t end it.

Minnesota was not just let down by flawed steel, but by a flawed commitment to safety and the public good.

And today, it’s being let down by shallow, showy, shrill, shrieking, agenda-driven hackery masquerading not only as “journalism” (where it stands out from the norm only through its own incompetence), but as armchair “engineering” to boot.

(Or as Coleman himself might say in his Bowery-Boys-via-Ole-And-Lena argot, the big cheese Coleman was so full of gas that his column got gusseted by the wingnuts) 

8 thoughts on “Right In The Gussets

  1. Mitch, I know it’s a waste of time, but you should invite Nick on your radio show one of these next few weeks. It would be more fun than a barrel of non-monkeys.
    Sadly, most of these guys (paging Jim Boyd) are afraid to actually have a debate with someone who doesn’t think exactly like them.

  2. “Morton-Thiokol – the company that designed and built the O-rings on the Challenger – left documentary evidence that they knew the O-rings could contract outside of tolerances during cold weather, there is no documentary evidence (available to the public, at any rate) that the bridge’s designers had the foggiest clue that their gusset plates were inadequate to the job.”

    The O-ring story is far more nuanced than you or Coleman reduce it to, but I don’t know too many people interested in all the detail. The real difficulty in judging these situations is not whether “documentary evidence” of a problem is uncovered after a disaster occurs. It’s how human beings are able to draw correct inferences from the mass of data prior to an unexpected event.

    In other words, Mitch, I don’t think your distinction is relevant, but I still agree with your main point. When people view events in hindsight through partisan lenses, they may draw conclusions differently from reasonable professionals who were on the scene.

    My main point is: people may be wrong to fasten on the bridge collapse as being directly caused by disinvestment in the state, but it doesn’t mean disinvestment is not harmful.

  3. The O-ring story is far more nuanced than you or Coleman reduce it to,

    Naturally. I was on the air when Challenger blew up, and the story was of great interest to me at the time. Of course, explaining it in great detail would involved…explaining it in great detail, which would be a bit of a tangent from this post.

    people may be wrong to fasten on the bridge collapse as being directly caused by disinvestment in the state, but it doesn’t mean disinvestment is not harmful.

    I agree.

    But I think that the GOP and TPL’s focus has been on more effective investment; the DFL has chosen to try to spin that as “disinvestment” which is…well, spin.

    Infrastructure was a problem – and even on the media radar – long before David Strom became boogeyman #1. Back when Minnesota still aggressively taxed and spent.

    There’s another post in there…

  4. When the family business is the Big Government-Big Media Complex, don’t be surprised when the offspring don’t take the time to learn or at least understand geometry, metallurgy or any of the physical sciences. Nepotism means even the most ill-informed, uneducated child has a slot for them somewhere on the payroll. In business, the only people who suffer when an incompetent relative has a job at the firm are the owners or stockholders. Unfortunately nepotism in Non-Monkey’s family costs every taxpayer an untold amount because charity in his family is getting someone else to pay more taxes so that he can feel good about himself regardless of whether the money spent is effective or not.

  5. Mitch,

    I’m extremely concerned about Oberstar’s statements in the StarTribune.

    U.S. Rep. James Oberstar, D- Minn., who criticized Rosenker’s comments Tuesday, again dismissed the NTSB’s preliminary conclusion that the bridge’s upkeep was not factor.

    “How do you make the leap from a structurally deficient bridge, clear examples of corrosion, and then say, ‘But these were not factors in the bridge collapse’ ?” he asked Friday.

    It looks to me that Oberstar is trying to influence the content of the NTSB report, and as the chairman of the transportation committee he has the power to do it.

    I’m predicting that the final report will have a small disclaimer somewhere that places some percentage of blame (~5%) on corrosion, and the DFL nitwits will use that as solid evidence that their orginal positions have been justified.

  6. Bowery-Boys-via-Ole-And-Lena argot

    That’s the perfect description of this guy. He’s a regular Huntz Hallberg. Another great fisk.

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