Bridges

I used to listen to Science Friday on NPR religiously. Now, I find myself skipping whole stories these days. They keep interviewing famous science writers who write fiction with some science in it. They talk about video pics of the week on their radio show. This was interesting a million years ago, but is just out of place now it seems.

Today they had a guy on who spoke about civil engineering. He was supposed to come on and scream bloody murder about how dangerous our infrastructure has become. He was intelligent, informative and spouted the facts. His big thing was “keep up the maintenance on bridges.” Ira seemed to want a controversy or outrage.

There are something like eight thousand bridges designed to fail without redundancy. The number of inspections is down. There was a collapse recently outside of Minneapolis. This collapse was what kicked off the story. The real story in my opinion was when you stop spending money on inspections and maintenance, your shit falls apart and takes anyone nearby down with it.

The gasoline tax was originally supposed to be used exclusively for infrastructure. We, it isn’t. Politicians don’t want to repair old things. Politicians want to open a new road. This makes for much better photo ops. It is up to the voters to remember how politicians voted when a tragedy happens. Sad.

one of the books was titled “Too Big to Fall”. Nice.

I still nearly turned this show off when they took a caler. This i something that I have a hard time with and I don’t even know why. I hate it when news shows accept calls on the air from just barely screened people. I do not understand what my problem with this is.