Public anger will follow our sorrow

The 35W bridge was "structurally deficient," we now learn, and had a rating of just
50 percent, the threshold for replacement.

By Nick Coleman, Star Tribune

August 02, 2007

http://www.startribune.com/10204/story/1339911.html

The cloud of dust above the Mississippi that rose after the Interstate 35W bridge
collapsed Wednesday evening has dissipated. But there are other dark clouds still
hanging over Minneapolis and Minnesota.

The fear of falling is a primal one, along with the fear of being trapped or of
drowning.

Minneapolis suffered a perfect storm of nightmares Wednesday evening, as anyone who
couldn't sleep last night can tell you. Including the parents who clench their jaws
and tighten their hands on the wheel every time they drive a carload of strapped-in
kids across a steep chasm or a rushing river. Don't panic, you tell yourself. The
people in charge of this know what they are doing. They make sure that the bridges
stay standing. And if there were a problem, they would tell us. Wouldn't they?

What if they didn't?

The death bridge was "structurally deficient," we now learn, and had a rating of just
50 percent, the threshold for replacement. But no one appears to have erred on the
side of public safety. The errors were all the other way.

Would you drive your kids or let your spouse drive over a bridge that had a sign
saying, "CAUTION: Fifty-Percent Bridge Ahead"?

No, you wouldn't. But there wasn't any warning on the Half Chance Bridge. There was
nothing that told you that you might be sitting in your over-heated car, bumper to
bumper, on a hot summer day, thinking of dinner with your wife or of going to see the
Twins game or taking your kids for a walk to Dairy Queen later when, in a rumble and
a roar, the world you knew would pancake into the river.

There isn't any bigger metaphor for a society in trouble then a bridge falling, its
concrete lanes pointing brokenly at the sky, its crumpled cars pointing down at the
deep waters where people disappeared.

Only this isn't a metaphor.

The focus at the moment is on the lives lost and injured and the heroic efforts of
rescuers and first-responders - good Samaritans and uniformed public servants.
Minnesotans can be proud of themselves, and of their emergency workers who answered
the call. But when you have a tragedy on this scale, it isn't just concrete and steel
that has failed us.

So far, we are told that it wasn't terrorists or tornados that brought the bridge
down. But those assurances are not reassuring.

They are troubling.

If it wasn't an act of God or the hand of hate, and it proves not to be just a lousy
accident - a girder mistakenly cut, a train that hit a support - then we are left to
conclude that it was worse than any of those things, because it was more mundane and
more insidious: This death and destruction was the result of incompetence or
indifference.

In a word, it was avoidable.

That means it should never have happened. And that means that public anger will
follow our sorrow as sure as night descended on the missing.

For half a dozen years, the motto of state government and particularly that of Gov.
Tim Pawlenty has been No New Taxes. It's been popular with a lot of voters and it has
mostly prevailed. So much so that Pawlenty vetoed a 5-cent gas tax increase - the
first in 20 years - last spring and millions were lost that might have gone to road
repair. And yes, it would have fallen even if the gas tax had gone through, because
we are years behind a dangerous curve when it comes to the replacement of
infrastructure that everyone but wingnuts in coonskin caps agree is one of the basic
duties of government.

I'm not just pointing fingers at Pawlenty. The outrage here is not partisan. It is
general.

Both political parties have tried to govern on the cheap, and both have dithered and
dallied and spent public wealth on stadiums while scrimping on the basics.

How ironic is it that tonight's scheduled groundbreaking for a new Twins ballpark has
been postponed? Even the stadium barkers realize it is in poor taste to celebrate the
spending of half a billion on ballparks when your bridges are falling down. Perhaps
this is a sign of shame. If so, it is welcome. Shame is overdue.

At the federal level, the parsimony is worse, and so is the negligence. A trillion
spent in Iraq, while schools crumble, there aren't enough cops on the street and
bridges decay while our leaders cross their fingers and ignore the rising chances of
disaster.

And now, one has fallen, to our great sorrow, and people died losing a gamble they
didn't even know they had taken. They believed someone was guarding the bridge.

We need a new slogan and we needed it yesterday:

"No More Collapses."