The Strange Death of Liberal America

From Minneapolis Bridge Inspection Report

I am angry, very angry. Like everyone who lives in the Twin Cities, I could have been on that bridge or someone I know could have been among the dead, still lying on the river bottom under twisted metal with a slab of concrete for a tombstone.

We know we stare at the equivalent of another Titanic, its massive hulk sitting in the Mississippi reminding us every day that something went horribly wrong. Finding answers requires the equivalent of diving into those swirling waters where the visibility is less than the length of your arm and you read the evidence as much by feel as by sight. You also need to clear away extraneous debris and look for clues in less obvious places.

What is the Bridge Ratings System?
But first some background. Federal and state officials have enjoyed a field day playing a verbal shell game with definitions and classifications, obfuscating the issue so as not to panic the public and, more important, bamboozling the reporters. To cut through this is actually quite simple. Just go the Association of Civil Engineers “Report Card” to find a detailed explanation of bridge classifications.

A structurally deficient bridge is closed or restricted to light vehicles because of its deteriorated structural components. While not necessarily unsafe, these bridges must have limits for speed and weight. A functionally obsolete bridge has older design features and, while it is not unsafe for all vehicles, it cannot safely accommodate current traffic volumes, and vehicle sizes and weights.

I’ll bet that’s a bit different than what you have been hearing. According to the report, as of 2003 there were approximately 160,570 bridges that met one of the above criteria. Let’s assume through some superhuman effort, we could inspect one a day. You do the math: it would take years to get them all inspected. The Report Card makes clear the magnitude of the task:

It is estimated that it will cost $9.4 billion per year for 20 years to eliminate all bridge deficiencies. The annual investment required to prevent the bridge investment backlog from increasing is estimated at $7.3 billion. Present funding trends of state departments of transportation call into question future progress on addressing bridge deficiencies.

Even if somehow these funds could be found, the inspections will be suspect. Why? “Follow the money,” said Deep Throat. With the Minneapolis bridge disaster following the money leads to a story every bit as appalling as the bungling that produced Katrina. Like Katrina it is a story which should be a wake-up call to every American.

How Are Bridges Inspected?
The key lies in the arcane practices of bridge inspection and a little-known study that exposes their deficiencies. Most people do not realize a majority of inspections are carried out by private contractors. An Internet search for “bridge inspections” will turn up many of these companies. The search also turns about a large number of training seminars and other learning opportunities for inspectors.

Who are these people who hold our lives in their hands? Most of them are dedicated and conscientious about work that can be dangerous, dirty and difficult. Imagine crawling under your car with a flashlight to examine the frame and other parts, then picture doing this hanging from a rope 50 or more feet in the air. Water drips in your face and debris may fall on you while pigeons fly around your head and other bridge inhabitants lurk in dark corners. This is not a story about corrupt inspectors, but about the system they must operate in. Most inspectors:

Must be either professional engineers or have a certain number of years’ experience working with bridges, using the federal code, which was last updated in 2005.

Since 2000, the United States Department of Transportation NDE (Non-Destructive Evaluation) Validation Center has been conducting an ongoing study of the reliability of bridge inspection. In a survey sent to all 50 states in the year 2000, the study found:

1. Professional engineers are typically not part of the onsite inspection team. [my emphasis]
2. There are no direct vision testing requirements for bridge inspectors.
3. Review of inspection reports and data entry are the most common forms of quality control.
4. VI is, by far, the most common form of NDE used in bridge inspection.

VI stands for visual inspection. There are, of course, other techniques: ultrasound, radiography, and acoustic emission. A little-known study by Xinbao Yu and Xiong Yu of Case Western Reserve University contains a table that shows what percentage of inspections use various techniques.

Like the authors of the NDE Validation Center study, these two researchers note:

Currently visual inspection method remains the main approach for bridge evaluation. The advantages of this method are economical, fast and simple. However, visual inspection is functionally limited, highly operator dependent and inaccessible to unexposed components.

The problem with using techniques more advanced than VI is that they require sophisticated equipment which requires trained operators which requires–guess what–money. Short of that cash, those critical inspections everyone is demanding will probably be conducted as they always have: by people clambering around under bridges poking and measuring in sometimes hazardous conditions.

How Accurate Are the Inspections?
Now comes the really scary part: bridges are scored like Olympic divers or gymnasts. Inspectors assign a number that rates the bridge and certain key parts. All those training seminars advertised on the Internet are essentially designed to instruct inspectors on how to assign those numbers. In other words, not only do they behave like Olympic judges but they are trained like them. Hopefully after sitting in uncomfortable chairs watching Powerpoints in some motel meeting room while eating stale catered meals, these inspectors will walk out into the sunlight and agree that a real defect on a real bridge is worth a “5.”

We all know how well that works in the Olympics. But Olympic judging at least has the advantage over VI inspection because there is at least a panel of experts doing the scoring, whereas usually only one person scores a bridge. One study showed just how subjective these judgments could be.

Last year, a Transportation Department audit of 43 bridges in Massachusetts, New York and Texas found that bridge inspectors routinely miscalculated the load capacity of structurally deficient bridges, posting weight limits that allowed vehicles exceeding the safety threshold or failing to do so at all.

The NDE Validation Center study will soon issue its 800-page final report, but some information is already available. One finding questioned the reliability of bridge inspections:

Routine Inspections are completed with significant variability. This variability is found in all aspects of the inspection process but is most prominent in the assignment of Condition Ratings, where bridge owners can expect 95% of Condition Ratings to be spread over five rating points.

In essence virtually all inspections vary so widely that their ratings raise serious questions about the reliability of the system.

The actual inspection document for the Minneapolis bridge can be found online, complete with pictures. The pictures not only give you some idea of what is involved in a visual inspection but the difficulty in conducting one and the potential for subjectivity. Not being an engineer I cannot comment on the observations, but it certainly is unnerving to see things like missing bolts, visible cracks and other damage.

The inspectors gave the bridge structure a 4, which given the variations cited in the study certainly should give anyone pause. The report stated:

The long term plans for this river crossing need to be defined with replacement, redecking, etc. Due to the “Fracture Critical” configuration of the main river spans and the problematic “crossbeam” details, and fatigue cracking in the approach spans, eventual replacement of the entire structure would be preferable.

Lately states (which shoulder the burden for most of the inspections) have been moving toward using computers to not only compile the data but insure a more consistent VI. An Indiana RFP describes the shortcomings of the current system:

Currently, there are no functions for electronic data collection, quality assurance inspections and ratings, or interactive customer services, which are functions that INDOT seeks to incorporate.

Yet there is one wrinkle in this which I found in an obscure paragraph in H.R. 1185, a transportation bill recently passed by the House. Paragraph #109 states:

Revises certain provisions expressing the sense of the Congress to state that the Federal Highway Administration’s current application of the Buy American test to only the components or parts of a bridge project and not the entire bridge project is inconsistent with the sense of Congress.

Several hours later I understood what this meant–and its significance to the Minnesota bridge. As you can see in the picture at the top of this article, the Minneapolis bridge was made of steel trusses. Under current law the steel used in bridges must come from the United States.

However, the current law states that the steel used in bridges can be inspected piecemeal. In other words, five pieces of steel in a bridge can all be inspected separately rather than as a unit which is sort of like checking your car out in pieces. Paragraph #109 is designed to remedy this ridiculous practice. But guess what? The Bush Administration opposes the change.

If the Republicans drag their feet on this important, but obscure issue it could disappear in conference or the President could even veto the entire bill until it is removed. If you want to know how committed your politicians are to fixing our bridges follow what happens to paragraph #109. Just how important it might be was signaled by late breaking news on Wednesday that the metal trusses may have had a serious design flaw.

It is at this point the Titanic meets the iceberg. Like bridge inspection, the Titanic depended on VI–someone on the ship to yell, “Iceberg ahead,” and then hope the captain could steer the ship clear. Modern ships have sonar and other devices to keep them from running into icebergs, but our bridge inspections still depend on the equivalent of “iceberg ahead.” Your safety relies on the judgment of some person precariously perched on a cherry-picker or dangling from a rope.

So what if they do yell, “iceberg ahead,” what happens? The bridges on those lists represent the equivalent of those icebergs only without seeing the actual inspection reports and their scoring no one knows their real condition. Plus with VI, we see only the tip of the iceberg.

Is There Enough Money to Fix the Nation’s Bridges?
So if your politicians are spouting off about fixing your bridges demand that they play with a full deck. That is, they need to see the raw data to really make an informed decision and they need to know if the inspection was VI only or some other technology was also used–and for what parts.

Yet for all this primitive warning system, America had been making some progress in repairing its highway infrastructure. The reason lies in a piece of legislation which, like everything else in this story, has an acronym: TEA-21 or in plain English Transportation Equity Act of the 21st Century.

First enacted under the Clinton Administration in 1998, TEA-21 was designed to shore up our infrastructure. There is only one problem–the Bush Administration and the then Republican Congress let TEA-21 expire in 2003. It was extended as the Safe, Accountable, Flexible, Efficient Transportation Equity Act: A Legacy for Users, which yields the improbable acronym SAFETEA-LU. Along with name change came a reduction in funding.

So we come to the money. When Ronald Reagan proclaimed government is the problem, the Republican Counterrevolution set about gutting the federal government by cutting budgets like a pirate in a drunken sword fight. Republican governors following the same philosophy gutted their governments and with it bridge inspection and repair.

Why Has Highway Funding Dropped?
A graph in the New York Times tells the story:

This may be the most important graph you will ever see, for it tells the story of what has happened to America in the last twenty-some years. Burn it into your memory so that when you walk into the voting booth in 2008 it is there to inform your decision. Note the precipitous decline starting with the Reagan Administration, the brief blip upwards during the Clinton years and then another downward drop when George Bush took office. This graph tells as well as any visual the story of The Republican Counterrevolution and its consequences for this country.

To make this medicine go down a little easier the Counterrevolution became enamored of what is now an overused buzzword: accountability. The idea in principle was that AFTER the cuts, any program or agency had to show immediate results in order to get more money. For highways and bridges this had an interesting consequence–as long as no bridges fell down it was assumed all was OK. It is a bit like the game the Counterrevolution has played across the board, the chief strategy of which is to pass everything on to the next administration (see Iraq).

Besides cutting back government the Counterrevolution also cut taxes, ramming through tax reductions for the wealthy, claiming they would bolster the economy while trickling just enough to the rest of us that we thought we were getting a Christmas bonus. People across the country bought into the tax cut philosophy even though they received enough for one month’s house payments–if they were lucky. Along with this came the infamous “no new taxes” pledge which Republicans in states like Minnesota signed as if it were the Magna Carta. We will forget for a moment the sheer idiocy of this idea and the huge deficits it has piled up and stick with bridges.

In a report on the bridge collapse, Minnesota Public Radio pointed out:

In the legislative session that ended in May, Gov. Pawlenty vetoed a transportation funding package that included a seven-and-a-half-cent-a-gallon gas tax increase to pay for new road and road construction as well as for the maintenance of the current infrastructure.

In essence the GOP sold us the equivalent of the Titanic and now the Titanic has hit an iceberg–for the second time if you count Katrina. That is why I am angry. Those deaths did not have to happen. I am even more angry because they happened for the basest of reasons–greed. Billionaires received their tax cuts and we got Katrina and bridges falling into the river. Tax cuts don’t fix levees or bridges.

Even more shortsightedly, as anyone who owns a home or car knows, cutting back on maintenance sooner or later will cost you more than the maintenance itself. So now Minnesota is debating whether to cut back on other infrastructure improvements so they can fix the bridge without raising taxes.

What is the Big Picture?
We seem to be learning that is no answer, but the real question is: Will we learn the larger lesson that government is not the problem but the solution? It’s not just physical infrastructure that has deteriorated under the Counterrevolution and lives are not only being lost by bridges collapsing. Our social and intellectual infrastructure is crumbling and killing people as surely as that bridge. The New York Times graph could stand for education or health care or social services just as easy as it does for infrastructure.

We all know about our schools, but did you know that in the same state that bridge collapsed that the number of schools in or near statutory operating debt–the financial equivalent of a bridge collapse–is skyrocketing? Did you know that the third leading cause of death in this country is medical errors, errors in part caused by a health care system as badly in need of repair as that bridge? And then there is the scandal of our inner cities where young black men are dying from guns almost as fast as our troops in Iraq.

If all that comes of the Minneapolis bridge disaster is more visual inspections and some bridges being fixed, America will have missed the point. If our presidential candidates and Congress continue to ignore the real cause, then you might as well analogize the entire country to the Titanic.

Right now I feel like a passenger in steerage who happens to look out a porthole to see an ominous wall of white. I yelled the equivalent of “iceberg ahead” in the book The Strange Death of Liberal America–all but predicting another disaster, but few noticed a voice coming from down here. Here’s what I wrote:

In a way the equivalent of many New Orleans already exist, their damages just as real and devastating…The big question plaguing America is whether this very real Counterrevolutionary hurricane will spur the same bureaucratic bungling and indifference that accompanied Katrina.

I’m yelling again. But after awhile you get hoarse. And you get discouraged. And you blame yourself because you could not get people to listen. And people keep dying unnecessarily.

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