The Minnesota Bridge Collapse

Everybody seems to be surprised, shocked even, at the collapse of the bridge over the Mississippi River in Minnesota, built only forty years ago and considered a marvel in engineering in its day. With an unbroken arch spanning 458 feet to permit an unbroken flow of barge traffic on the river, it was considered a novel design, perhaps bordering on revolutionary.

Alas, the engineers who designed the Interstate 35W bridge clearly neglected to consider the possibilities of such a bridge not having enough support to withstand such a long span. The dirty little secret about American engineering - supposedly the best engineering in the world - is that more often than not, bridge engineers aren't as educated as much as they are trained, meaning they don't contemplate the variables or the probabilities of a design's structural integrity. They just have one objective: Span the chasm. Period.

Expect more of the same as happened in Minnesota. Many bridges in the United States are routinely found to be "structurally deficient" upon inspection, and there have been high-profile collapses in the past. Consider the 1983 collapse of a bridge on Interstate 95 in Connecticut, killing three, or the 1987 collapse of a bridge on the New York State Thruway that killed ten. Yes, erosion of the components overtime are to blame, but in many cases so are the quality of the design and the construction, undertaken by engineers and contractors more interested in saving money than saving lives.

London Bridge isn't falling down, but then maybe that's because the British - and everyone else - take more care in building their infrastructure than we do.