Bridges: 77,000 deficient, 750 have I-35W design

At Bridge Site, Search of River Moves Slowly - New York Times

... Dan Dorgan, a state bridge engineer for the Minnesota Department of Transportation, said a “deficient” designation did not mean a bridge needed to be immediately replaced; 77,000 bridges across the country, he said, have a similar designation...

Elsewhere I read that 750 bridges have the same design as our fallen I-35W bridge. I wonder what percentage of those are rated as deficient?

Maybe Google will start attaching design and deficiency rations to Google Earth/Maps. I bet that would be a good way to attract users.

This accident may end up costing billions ...

8/3/07 Update: I thought a bit more about how Google could accelerate the infrastructure review. A "route around risky bridge" option for Google Map directions would concentrate minds wonderfully. One can readily imagine icons for bridges with the I-35W design and risk designation. Did I say "billions"? Sorry, I meant tens to hundreds of billions ...

8/9/07 Update: My wife points out that as much as we may despise Pawlenty, it was the Ventura administration, albeit as part of a GOP initiative that returned a state budget surplus to the taxpayer rather than, say, use it to repair bridges. So Jesse Ventura deserves a chunk of the I-35W bridge for his desk.

Wikipedia and the I-35W collapse

As expected, Wikipedia now has a good initial entry on the I-35W Mississippi River bridge collapse. This will be the place to go over the next few weeks and months to get an understanding of what happened. The Wikipedia article references the National Bridge Inventory but I was unable to find any record for the 35W bridge at this time. I will be most interested in seeing a list of bridges of similar age, design and history -- though one or more of construction error and local geology may turn out to be relatively unique contributors.

The Wikipedia article links to the Silver Bridge collapse of 1967, the outcome of the subsequent investigation suggests what may lie ahead:

... The collapse focused much needed attention on the condition of older bridges, leading to intensified inspection protocols and numerous eventual replacements. There were only three other bridges built to a similar design, one upstream at St Mary's and a longer bridge at Florianopolis, Brazil. They were both closed immediately, and the St Mary's bridge demolished in 1971....

I suspect we'll know within a few days which bridges in the US have a similar design.

Update 8/2/07: Culturally, slow to anger, but ....

Update 8/2/07: I've seen mentions of a bridge failure in 1983, the reference is to metal corrosion that caused the collapse of the Mianus River Bridge in Connecticut, killing 3 people and injuring 5 others. Wikipedia has a list of bridge disasters.

Why didn't more people die when 35W fell?

It is no comfort to the loved ones of the 13 who appear to have died, or to those facing lifelong disability from the fall of the I-35W bridge, but the greatest puzzle of the disaster is that so many survived. What are Minnesotans made of?

How did so many survive?

It's hard to imagine anyone surviving a six-story drop into the Mississippi River.

But it's now apparent that the vast majority of those who were on the Interstate 35W bridge when it collapsed Wednesday escaped with relatively minor injuries.

Although the final death toll is still unknown, doctors and safety experts say that a combination of factors, from physics to shock absorbers, probably helped cushion the blow for those plunging from the bridge in their vehicles.

In general, they say, the cars and the bridge itself helped absorb some of the impact that would have killed someone free-falling from that height.

"I would say over two-thirds of the people walked away," said Dr. Marc Conterato, an emergency room physician at North Memorial Medical Center in Robbinsdale, who was at the site. "Believe me, the human body can absorb a lot of trauma."

As of Saturday, the death toll stood at five, and 24 people remained hospitalized, five in critical condition and four in serious. About 75 others were treated and released. About eight people are missing and presumed drowned.

As tragic as that is, it's a far cry from what some at the scene expected.

"I figured we'd probably have a couple of hundred injured, and 25 or 50 fatalities," said Dr. John Hick, an emergency doctor and disaster coordinator at Hennepin County Medical Center.

Many of those treated at hospitals had broken bones, fractures or back injuries from the vertical fall, according to physicians.

"I've certainly seen many worse injuries in car crashes," said Dr. Jeffrey Chipman, a trauma surgeon at the University of Minnesota Medical Center, Fairview.

In some cases, the vehicles dropped straight down on top of a portion of the bridge as it hit the water. That "would have created some kind of cushion when they landed," Chipman said.

James Kakalios, a physics professor at the University of Minnesota, agreed. "Some of them were able to ride parts of the expressway down," he said. "And that helped distribute the force and save the individual cars, as opposed to a car just falling 50 feet on its own."

Vehicle safety designs probably also played a role, said Lanny Berke, a mechanical engineer and safety specialist in Plymouth who is a frequent expert witness in accident cases.

"Let's start with the school bus," he said, referring to the bus carrying dozens of children. Because of federal safety rules, he said, it had an emergency door at the rear through which they could escape. "So the federally mandated design features for school buses saved those kids' lives," he said. "Because there's no way in hell they could have gotten out the front."

At the same time, he said, seat belts and airbags could have helped some survive, as well.

And the survivors had another thing going for them, the experts agree. "We were lucky," said Conterato. "We were actually in an area that was very well populated. People had relatively easy access to the area. Plus, we were relatively close to two large medical facilities, the university and Hennepin County. So we were able to put people on the scene relatively quickly.

I'm sure the cars were helpful, but the construction workers were standing on the bridge. They lost one person. Did they fly?

I suspect a lot of incidental bystanders took heroic risks to help people, risks that by rights should have killed them as well. Somehow even the rescuers survived. The rush hour group is also probably younger and more vigorous than a random population sample, Minnesotans are relatively healthy by national standards, the river is warm right now, and we obviously have a lot of competent swimmers ...

No Google Earth infrastructure layer: thoughts on the community model

A week or two ago I speculated that Google could move the infrastructure discussion along ....

Gordon's Notes: Bridges: 77,000 deficient, 750 have I-35W design

8/3/07 Update: I thought a bit more about how Google could accelerate the infrastructure review. A 'route around risky bridge' option for Google Map directions would concentrate minds wonderfully. One can readily imagine icons for bridges with the I-35W design and risk designation....

In the meantime, I was pretty sure the Google Earth community would put an infrastructure layer up that would attach federal infrastructure ratings to bridges like this one (Strib, Aug 11, 2007)...

Corroded strands of rebar jut from the sides and pillars of the cracked Hwy. 36 bridge near Stillwater, while jagged pieces of fallen concrete litter the ground below.

Every day, nearly 10,000 vehicles travel eastbound over the crumbling structure. Most of the people in the huge trucks, cars and school buses on the bridge are unaware that it has been listed federally as "basically intolerable."...

I still can't find such a layer, though problems with the OS X version of GE may be limiting my search (Is Google losing interest in GE in favor of Maps only?). Today I posted a comment on a GE blog to try to move things along. In a sad sign of the times the blog I commented to does point to a Google Maps mash-up that claims to do just what I want -- but that map is festooned with ad words, shows no data, and seems to be a splog. Yech. I'll withhold that URL, thank you.

All of which leads to two questions. Why do some community products take off and others don't? Are we seeing a community fatigue where the small minority of compulsive contributors are tapped out?

I'm fairy sure the latter is true -- it would be very odd if we didn't see a drop in participation after the usual early adopter surge -- followed by a resurgence a few years from now. The relentless onslaught of the fraudulent and parasitic "contributor" (e.g. splogs) doesn't help, but of course game theorists and evolutionary biologists know how inevitable that is. [Hint: If you're going to do a genuine community project, you probably can't do advertising at all.]

As to the former, I think that question is going to be discussed for many a year to come. It's easy to guess that the mathematical model for community project success will resemble the models used to forecast disease epidemics. I think this would be a nice little project for a class in mathematical modeling ...

The Minneapolis Friday Night Skate

Once or twice a summer the stars align and I get to go on the Minneapolis Friday Night Skate

The Friday Night Skate winds through downtown Minneapolis... For the most part we stay in a pack, stopping every few miles to re-group. The skate lets you hang out with your friends, meet some new friends, see downtown, get some exercise, but most of all... have a great time!

... The skates happen every second and fourth Friday of the month. The skates start promptly at 9:00 PM. In order to get ready we recommend that you get there by 8:30...

The web site is a bit dusty, but it's got the directions. I used to do these skates several times a summer, but it's tricky to protect the time.

Tonight was a beautiful skate. Pleasant breeze, nice paced group, beautiful sites, lots of people watching. We cross the Stone Arch bridge and climb the hill to overlooking the Guthrie, the Mill City Museum and park, the river and the the 35W bridge ...

The wee little iphone picture shows a bit of the Guthrie and a rosy sunset. We skate down the helical ramp of Mt Guthrie and then down to view the 35W bridge. It's a dull bridge in the daylight, but at night the lighting glows a charming green.

We wind around the Metrodome and then up Hennepin. Tonight there were a lot of kids and young adults hanging around, probably doing stuff I don't want my kids to do. One of our group is a compulsive waver, she even got most of the retailers to wave a bit. I caught up with two members of Minneapolis Mad Dads, including the president and founder of the local 13 yo chapter. What might be mildly intimidating on foot seems mostly curious on skates; we amuse the night life and move pretty quickly.

Heading inland towards Loring Park we pass through the downtown theater district -- they were doing a good trade tonight. We got a good number of waves and cheers. The park was dark in the crescent moon, but I know it well. This year the fountain is in good health, first time I've seen it for a while. We head back down Nicollet mall, and of course this time of year there's always some Aquatennial thing going on ...

On skates it's easy to look over the audience.

From there we cut across a building plaza where the security guards are often mildly perturbed (young one tonight), but they rarely bother us if we don't play around the pillars. There's some skating around the fountain there, then a dash across the right lane of the Hennepin bridge -- smooth downhill and good lighting.

It's one of my favorite night time outings. If you're in Minneapolis, and you're a competent and confident urban skater -- give it a try. Helmet and wrist guards are recommended, though tonight only I wore the latter. There's a Facebook group for the Friday Skate and a Page for the related MN Inline Skate Club.

Another week, another bridge closing

The collapse of the 35W bridge was no fluke.

That's the lesson of the fourth or fifth major bridge closure in the metro area: MnDOT barricades Hwy. 43 bridge in Winona.

Minnesota's GOP legislature and GOP governors have been neglecting public infrastructure for a long time.

We finally got the GOP out of the senate, but still have a GOP governor. He's not what he used to be though, deaths from the 35W bridge put Pawlenty on the defensive. His presidential ambitions are at stake.

Maybe we need a law to hold legislators personally responsible for criminal neglect. Shame that legislators would have to write the law.

No bad bridge maps: Bridge ratings are now top secret

After our local bridge fell, I wondered if Google could add a "bridge rating" icon to their map layers:

Gordon's Notes: Bridges: 77,000 deficient, 750 have I-35W design

... I thought a bit more about how Google could accelerate the infrastructure review. A 'route around risky bridge' option for Google Map directions would concentrate minds wonderfully. One can readily imagine icons for bridges with the I-35W design and risk designation...

Recently, our Republican governor managed to have all MN bridge ratings declared "top secret". The ratings could help the terrorists, you see.

I have to hand it to Pawlenty. He waited a few weeks to give the public time to completely forget about the bridge, then he made it impossible for anyone to track the state of MN bridges.

That should help block a gasoline tax. Our local media have been playing dead of course, they know almost no-one is paying attention.

Smooth.

Update on Peter Hausmann post - family fund

A few days ago I was moved by the story of Peter Hausman, a father of four who escaped the fall of the 35W bridge then drowned trying to help other victims. With a bit of trepidation, since not everyone knows that geek is a term of praise, I wrote:

... One might wish Peter, father of four, had been less heroic, but he was. MPR has a small article about him. I'd have titled this post "A geek dies heroically" but I can't know if Peter would have approved...

I never think my posts are widely read, so I was a bit surprised to hear from Peter's family. They told me Peter would have appreciated my sentiments. I've updated the post with information on a memorial fund to support his four young children.

Peter Hausmann Memorial Fund
c/o Anchor Bank
66 Thomas Ave E
West St. Paul, MN 55118

2011 comes early: Ms. Carbon Tax, meet Mr. Bridge

I figured American life would change when gas hit $5/gallon in 2011. I picked that date because I figured we won't get a carbon tax through before 2013. That was before one of my local bridges took a tumble and I started to do the math on 77,000 "deficient" (rating =4) bridges and wonder how much it costs to (re)build a bridge. If we assume an average cost of, say, $30 million each, and we assume we replace/rebuild only 40,000 deficient bridges, that's $1.2 trillion dollars.

Now, perhaps we'll decide that the I-35W collapse was basically in line with expectations. We all understand that bridge ratings are probabilistic -- the yearly risk of catastrophic collapse is not 0% at the highest rating (10) or 100% at the lowest rating (0). Maybe it's something like a 1/100,000 risk at the rating of 4, with a substantially higher risk of non-catastrophic failure. With 77,000 bridges at that rating we should expect one to collapse every few years somewhere in the US and approximately 50 people to die or be injured by bridge collapse every 1-2 years.

That's a risk that a Vulcan would probably find quite reasonable. It's probably significantly less than the risk we assume with current food imports; riding a motorcycle is probably a hundred to a thousand times higher risk. Logically we may decide to just accept that and stick with our current bridge replacement/repair policies.

Humans are not logical. There's a good chance we'll run up a trillion dollar infrastructure repair bill rather than have yearly bridge collapse headlines.

We could simply borrow to build. It's a much better investment than the Iraq war, for example. I have a hunch though that Bush has busted our budget already. So we need to raise a trillion dollars.

We also need to reduce CO2 emissions.

We also need to decrease the load on our old infrastructure.

Gee, I wonder how we could do all of these things ...

$5/gallon by 2009?

PS. If I were in a business related to bridge construction, I'd be hiring today ...

Update 9/17/07: This is looking more likely ...

Update 9/21/07: It occurs to me that this is the cure for the AMT problem. More on that in a f/u post.

Rome burns. Bush fiddles.

We have a 1.5 trillion dollar infrastructure bill to pay.

MPR: Bush cool to federal gas tax increase

Just one week after the deadly I-35W bridge collapse in Minneapolis, President Bush reacted coolly to a plan to raise the federal gas tax.

President Bush said Congress should reprioritize the way it spends highway money instead of raising taxes to pay for future bridge repair.

"Before we raise taxes, which could affect economic growth, I would strongly urge the Congress to examine how they set priorities," said Bush. "If bridges are a priority, let's make sure that we set that priority before we raise taxes."

Bush made the comments one day after Rep. Jim Oberstar, DFL-Minn., announced a plan to increase the federal gas tax from 18 to 23 cents a gallon.

Oberstar, who chairs the House Transportation Committee, says the money would go into a new trust fund for repairing and replacing bridges. He said the plan would raise about $25 billion over three years....

Cut out GOP senator Stevens bridge to nowhere and a few similar boondoggles, and you get maybe $3 billion. We don't need $3 billion. Bush is an idiot.

On the other hand, assume we need to raise $2 trillion over 25 years (cost plus interest), so we need an extra $80 billion a year for the next 25 years. That's more like a 15 cents a gallon price rise in the gas tax. So three times what Oberstar is saying now, but, still, he's at least on the right track.

[rewritten, because I was too sleepy to remember we don't need to raise all the money all at once.]


I think we're going to lose at least a dozen major bridges before we get real.

Obama YouTube - Minnesota can expect some bridges

We're the state who's bridge fell down a couple of years ago. Looks like we can expect some accelerated bridge maintenance ...

Obama Vows Swift Action on Vast Economic Stimulus Plan

...Mr. Obama’s address, a video of which was made available on YouTube, was the keynote of an effort to calm tumultuous financial markets roiled by an apparent leadership vacuum in Washington before he takes office in two months...

No joke about the vacuum. Gail Collins made a semi-serious plea for Cheney and Bush to resign, so Pelosi could turn things over to Obama.

Our 35W bridge didn't fall for lack of maintenance of course. It had an egregious design flaw. Still, there are a lot of roads, bridges, bicycle trails, walking trails, school grounds, state parks, national parks and other public spaces and facilities that could do with a refresh.

Looks like we'll get that.

Incidentally, these YouTube addresses are amazing to me. I can actually watch my leader speak and not feel nauseous and horrified. It's like balm on an old wound.

My MN congressman calls for a federal gas tax increase

This is why Exxon has been running a fake fear campaign in Minnesota papers. My congressman, Betty McCollum, has declared in favor of a gas tax. I probably need not mention that McCollum has one of the safest safe seats in America ... (emphases mine)

TwinCities.com - U.S. Rep. McCollum calls for gas tax hikes to pay for rebuilding nation's infrastructure

Citing America's crumbling roads and bridges, U.S. Rep. Betty McCollum [jg: home area is Saint Paul, MN] today said she supports increasing both state and federal gas taxes to pay for a nationwide infrastructure rebuilding effort.

Before revisiting the site of the collapsed Interstate 35W bridge in Minneapolis, the St. Paul Democrat said, "over the past 20 years, we have not been reinvesting in infrastructure... the way we need to support the common good of our country. The bill's coming due."

Asked how she would pay that bill, McCollum replied, "I believe we need to look at the gas tax."

She didn't say how large a gas tax increase she would support, deferring to the House Transportation Committee and its chairman, Rep. Jim Oberstar, D-Minn., to determine the funding needs. Oberstar has proposed a temporary nickel-a-gallon gas tax increase to finance a bridge-rebuilding program...

If a carbon tax PAC existed, we'd be donating to a future McCollum senate run. (She doesn't need money for a House campaign, she basically runs unopposed). Minnesota's representatives get some cover on this gas tax stuff because we're a water-sucking corn fuel state; presumably the ethanol portion of gasoline would not be taxed, thereby creating price support for biofuels.

Infrastructure repair, of course, is only a cover story. The legitimate justification for a gasoline tax is that it's an essential first step towards greater carbon taxes.

Hmm, do you think I should start that carbon tax PAC?

Sprawl - the Minnesota version

Twin Cities SE Metro Area: South of 169, East of 35W

Wow. Today our family drove about 30 miles east and south of Saint Paul for an Apple Orchard outing. It's been a few years since we last did that trip; the transformation of the region is stunning.

Where once was rolling farmland and a few small towns, now there's endless mushroom houses being built. "Executive" estates and more "modest" vast homes -- costing 500K to well over 1 million dollars. Hundreds, maybe thousands of them -- across an area that's probably over 500 square miles. There's nothing in the metro area to slow this type of sprawl -- the Twin Cities has no natural boundaries. Maybe one day it will run into the Rocky Mountains.

It looked miserable. We'll miss the orchards -- their days are numbered.

Recently, during a walk through the desolate Atlanta downtown, a particularly persistent panhandler told me that the Twin Cities had more millionaires per capita than any other metro area. I figured he was exagerrating, but these developments give me pause. These are homes for millionaires with rather unremarkable taste -- but evidently there are no lack of such.

One has to assume such a massive concentration of wealth will elect enough politicians to build the highways they'll need* -- but I wonder if the Twin Cities will really cooperate. If not the as yet unbuilt suburban highways will run aground south of the cities -- and the millionaires will be spending hours in their cars. Yech. What a strange way to spend money.

Perhaps the market for personal flying machines will "take off" ...

* The population density isn't all that high in the developments, but they will draw in higher density population in the flatlands. It's the plebian neighbors that will clog the roads.

Update 10/3: A colleague tells me the Savage, Prior Lake, 169 region is among the top five most rapidly developing areas in the nation. So in the peak of a housing craze, this is one of the frothiest bubbles. Thinking more about the traffic problems, all I can figure is either these folks don't have to work or they're combining generational transfers (inheritances) with massive loans to make the initial downpayment, and then paying off the rest in the sweat equity of time spent in traffic. In other words, they're not as wealthy as their homes.