FALLING BRIDGE!

They're likely to find that thousands of the nation's bridges are at risk. That's been the conclusion of similar reports in the past.

But while bridges in the United States fall down from time to time, it happens infrequently enough that the problem seldom draws sustained public attention.

In 1983, a section of a bridge on I-95 in Connecticut fell, killing three people and causing inconvenience to millions of drivers in the Northeast until it was rebuilt.

Dozens were killed in 1967 when the Silver Bridge across the Ohio River between West Virginia and Ohio failed.

Perhaps the most well-known bridge collapse, at least among physics students who had to watch the film in school, is the Tacoma Narrows suspension-bridge collapse from 1940.

While those three events were tied to failures of the structure or design, other collapses have been the result of catastrophic natural events. The collapse of a section of the Bay Bridge between San Francisco and Oakland, Calif., occurred in 1989's Loma Prieta earthquake, which also destroyed a substantial section of double-decked freeway in the East Bay. More recently, the causeways and bridge structures across Louisiana's Lake Pontchartrain and along the southern Mississippi coast were devastated by Hurricane Katrina almost two years ago.

In 2005, the American Society of Civil Engineers gave America's nearly 600,000 bridges an overall grade of C, or "mediocre." The report found that between 2000 and 2003, the percentage of bridges rated structurally deficient, or functionally obsolete, had actually declined from 28.5% to 27.1%.

However, that still left about 160,000 bridges needing work or replacement, and the society's engineers estimated that this would take $9.4 billion a year for two decades to fix all of them.

While the investigation of the Minnesota bridge collapse has yet to get under way, initial reports indicate that it had been inspected regularly in its 40 years of existence.

So, as tragedies of this kind are relatively infrequent, and as demand for more roads and highways remains very high, the effort necessary to reduce the number of bridge collapses is probably not likely to gain much headway.

reporter,
- Tom Bemis

The bridge ........... went down

The bridge in New York City

I think that the bridge every ones in a while should be repaired, that's all I'm saying.

"REFUTES OBJECTION TO BRIDGE SITE; Port Authority, in Petition to Estimate Board, Asks Approval of Fort Lee Plans. CHANGE WOULD BE COSTLY Promises Land Gift Equivalent to Area to Be Taken From Fort Washington Park."

My First Blog!

I like my blog. My first exciting experience blogging is so cool because I never heard about this before. Peace out!