TwinCities.comI am so pissed I have even chased The GirlFriend™ from the dining room. I can't believe the bullshit that is being played over the Hastings bridge. It is in worse shape than the 35W bridge that collapsed in Minneapolis. It takes as much traffic as that bridge, and with less lanes.
"The Hastings Bridge is not safe," state Sen. Katie Sieben, DFL-Newport, said at a Capitol news conference Tuesday. "The repairs need to happen now. The replacement needs to happen now."
And this?
The Minnesota Department of Transportation refuses to release an in-depth inspection of the outdated bridge, citing a concern that terrorists could exploit the weaknesses of the narrow span.It exceeds bullshit by about a power of 10. Concern about terrorists? What fucking cowards. They really need to pull their fucking heads out of their asses. No terrorists are going to knock down the Hastings bridge. What the hell for? Our damn politicians are doing it for them by playing the denial game. It will fall down all by itself, the shape it is in.
Fucking assholes.
The terrorist bit just reaffirms what I have long said, that people who use terror as rationales for anything at all are just adding to the victory of those who committed 9/11.
Meanwhile your bridge could be all a matter of the gussets. We have determined that on Steve Bates' weblog. The gusset plates were too thin in Minneapolis. Half an inch when they were supposed to be a full inch. You have to make sure the Hastings people see to that, though it will be a bear of a job, fixing those.
The details of the bridge's construction are available as public records. Of course, those are the pre-build plans, and not the as-built blue prints, but bridges have been cookie-cuttered for decades from a few basic examples taught in engineering schools. Any demolition guy would just have to spend a couple of minutes looking at an individual bridge to know where to put a charge. All the the reports would tell him is that it was worth wasting the charge, because the thing is going to collapse on its own.
The war on terror is all about covering up the incompetence and corruption, not about making the nation secure.