Erik Ackerman

Bridges and Safety

Aug 3, 2007

I heard this morning that the Governor of Minnesota has called for an emergency inspection of all bridges in the state with the same structure as the one that collapsed.

I may well be missing something here, but my understanding is that there is already a national bridge inspection database, which rated the collapsed bridge as unsafe in 1990. We don't need an emergency inspection sweep, we need to do something about the bridges which have already been inspected and rated unsafe.

It was said that the unsafe rating was not significant because there were 77,000 other bridges with the same rating in the country. To me, this seems like saying that DUI related deaths are not significant because there are hundreds of them every year. The fact that there are lots of a bad thing does not make the thing better. Maybe I'm just missing the logic here.