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Photo: Minneapolis Star Tribune
I have always been one of those people who had a thing about bridges the way some people fear flying or others fear heights. If I have to stop in traffic on a bridge, especially one over water, my heart starts racing, my palms sweat and I start to plot escape routes, even to the point of opening a car window in the middle of winter.
I dream about bridges collapsing, finding myself falling, falling, falling, gathering more and more speed until my body screams like a plane in a steep dive. But I never hit water. Instead I wake up screaming with my heart threatening to blow itself right out of my chest while it skips beats in syncopated terror. Little did I know that yesterday my nightmare would become real.
The bridge I have most feared to drive over fell into the Mississippi River in Minneapolis. There was a more than remote possibility that my wife was on that bridge when it went down.
A frantic cell phone call alerted me that the entire system was jammed with others like me seeking word of friends and relatives or just spreading the news. The person who wrote cell phones were great emergency devices must have never thought of a moment when hundreds of thousands of people would all use the phone at the same time. When I finally got through, I received the answer I dreaded–no one would answer the phone. I left a message not knowing if it would ever be received.
What I did know at that point was that she was one her way from work to dinner at a friend’s house–a route that would take her over that bridge at about the time the media said it had collapsed. A call to the friend only got me the answering machine leading me to irrationally wonder if somehow the two might be together.
Meanwhile several of us in the city meeting I was attending waited for similar return calls. Later as the news began to trickle in we would hear harrowing stories of the lucky and the heroic. A school bus full of children miraculously dropped thirty feet, only to land right side up on its tires and on the edge of the river but not in it. The children aboard were badly shaken but managed to all walk out through the rear emergency entrance.
A paraplegic driving a specially equipped van felt the bridge start to go and with quick thinking I never would have possessed, purposely drove into a guard rail so he would not fall into the river. As the vehicle perilously hung over the abyss, bystanders yelled for him to get out. Finally several unsung heroes braved the walk down to the van and managed to carry him to safety. That van is on the right in the picture above. Note the wheelchair ramp. Would you have had the courage to walk down there? For more photos and video see the Minneapolis Star Tribune.
The inevitable macabre jokes circulated among the group I was with in an attempt to break the tension. One person reported that ambulances were having trouble getting to the bridge because there were so many lawyers on the scene.
There may be some truth to that. Bridges do not just collapse. They usually collapse because of mistakes or failures. Ironically a construction crew was making repairs to the bridge when the disaster occurred.
As I waited for a return phone call from someone, I wondered if this would become another Katrina. Katrina revealed the precariousness of New Orleans’ levees and FEMA’s mismanagement. This incident reveals the perilousness of America’s deteriorating infrastructure and its mismanagement.
The most sobering evidence can be found at the American Society of Civil Engineers site. Its “Report Card on America’s Infrastructure” page features a scrolling list of problems running continuously across the top. I am not being dramatic when I say that when I opened that page, it showed:
27.1% of our nation’s bridges are structurally deficient or functionally obsolete.
The report’s first sentence does just what it is designed to do–catch your attention:
With each passing day, aging and overburdened infrastructure threatens the economy and quality of life in every state, city and town in the nation.
The report goes on to observe:
ASCE estimates that $1.6 trillion is needed over a five-year period to bring the nation’s infrastructure to a good condition. Establishing a long-term development and maintenance plan must become a national priority.
The site features an interactive map of the United States that allows you to click on your state and read about its problems. The entry for Minnesota notes:
$6.5 billion lost in dedicated transportation funding due to legislation passed in 1981 that was not fully implemented and ultimately repealed.
While the deteriorating quality of America’s infrastructure currently is not a major campaign issue, it is symbolic of a rottenness at the core of the Republican Counterrevolution. It is like one of those eyesore houses with the roof sprouting loose shingles, the exterior peeling paint and the windows cracked, the whole mess sitting in a yard of weeds and garbage.
This nation has neglected much in the name of cutting back government. Perhaps that bridge will finally get it through to some thick skulls that billionaires with extra cash will not fix bridges and roads or help our schools or provide better health care. All these are the functions of government, but when you mindlessly quote the Reagan mantra that government is the problem then government can no longer fulfill its mission.
The result is poorly performing schools and a health care system that ranks poorly in relation to other similar countries. You also have bridges falling into rivers. I hope that from now on anyone who utters the Reagan mantra will be greeted with the derision they deserve.
In the end I was lucky–my wife called back about an hour and a half after I first heard about the disaster. But others in the area did not receive such welcome news.
Nor has America received welcome news lately. In our state a stubborn governor continues to stick to his no new taxes pledge, even if it means shorting schools, health care and infrastructure. Until we dispose of the ridiculous notion that government is not needed, we will continue to face the equivalent of that bridge collapsing in Minneapolis.
It is time to end this madness.
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