Bridge collapse a wake-up call for politicians
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WASHINGTON (Reuters) -U.S. politicians on Thursday treated
the collapse of a highway bridge that killed or injured dozens
of people as a jarring wake-up call to fix the nation&39;t fall down,” said Sen.
Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat at a news conference in
Minneapolis. “We have to get to the bottom of this.”
“We should look at this tragedy that occurred as a wake-up
call for us,” said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada
Democrat. “We have all over the country a crumbling
infrastructure; highways, bridges and dams. We really need to
take a hard look at this.”
Rep. James Oberstar, the Minnesota Democrat who chairs the
House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, blamed
President George W. Bush&36;2 billion a year for bridge reconstruction when lawmakers were
pushing for &39;re not going to settle for a bargain-basement
transportation” policy, Oberstar said.
The problem of aging infrastructure is not new. A 2002
report by the Department of Transportation said about 30
percent of the nation&39;s bridges were deteriorating with
age and growing traffic volumes were increasing the strain on
them.
ALMOST FAILING &39; GRADE
A 2005 report by the American Society of Civil Engineers
gave the country&36;1.6 trillion over five years to put its infrastructure
into good shape.
“This has been out there for quite some time,” said Kent
Harries, an engineering professor at the University of
Pittsburgh. “It&39;s aviation system, dams, drinking
water, electric power grid and hazardous waste system.
Robert Dodds, head of the engineering department at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said what made the
bridge collapse so shocking was the general reliability of
bridges nationwide.
“We take their safety for granted every day,” he said.
But Harries said infrastructure failures happen more
frequently than most people notice, pointing to the collapse of
a concrete bridge box girder near Pittsburgh in 2005 and the
recent explosion of a steam pipe in Manhattan. Part of the
problem is finding maintenance funds.
“We recognize that there is a problem but there just seems
to be this inability to move on it, partially I suspect because
the problem is so amazingly large. The dollar values that we’re
talking about, they defy understand,” Harries said.
Funding it all would require trillions of dollars. The only
way to address the issue is to prioritize, he said, but then
politics comes into play.
“The fact of the matter is nobody gets their name on a
bridge repair,” Harries said. “You build a bridge, you get your
name on it.”
(Additional reporting by Jon Hurdle in Philadelphia, Carey
Gillam in Kansas City and Rick Cowan in Washington)
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