Infrastructure Policy: Lessons from American History
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On August 1, 2007, as rush-hour traffic carried workers home from their jobs in downtown Minneapolis, a decades-old bridge spanning the Mississippi River collapsed without warning into the waters one hundred feet below. The bridge crumbled at a moment when over a hundred vehicles — including a school bus carrying sixty-one children — were driving or parked on it. As the local Star-Tribune reported the next day, “The span was packed with rush-hour traffic, and dozens of vehicles fell with the bridge leaving scores of dazed commuters scrambling for their lives.” “I heard it creaking and making all sorts of noises it shouldn’t make,” said one man who was driving on a road under the bridge, en route to a Minnesota Twins baseball game, seconds before the collapse. “And then the bridge just started to fall apart.”
The collapse killed thirteen people and injured 145 more. The school bus, amazingly, landed on all four of its tires, missing the water and coming to rest on a parkway, according to the Star-Tribune. Its passengers escaped with only injuries.
Before the dust could settle, let alone the cause of the collapse be ascertained, the failure of the I-35W Bridge reheated a long-simmering debate over the state of American infrastructure. It was not the first major infrastructure failure in recent memory, only the latest, coming on the heels of the New Orleans levee breaks of 2005 and the Northeast power grid blackout of August 2003, and so the arguments were already familiar. Within days of the collapse, the Christian Science Monitor asserted that the bridge failure “spotlights America’s deferred maintenance” of its dams, levees, highways and bridges; the New York Times editorialized that as “the nation’s physical foundations seem to be crumbling beneath us,” “the larger problem of crumbling roads, bridges and levees and crashing electrical grids can almost always be traced to a lack of investment.” The Times called for increased federal spending, the establishment of a national infrastructure bank, and the creation of a national commission on infrastructure priorities.
Three years later, the nation continues to grapple with fundamental questions of how to plan, build, and maintain major infrastructure. Barry B. LePatner, a New York attorney noted for his decades of experience in construction and real estate law, takes a leading role in that debate with his new book, Too Big to Fall. Using the I-35W Bridge collapse as his primary case study, LePatner paints a dire picture of the state of national infrastructure, and he proposes solutions whose boldness matches the magnitude of the apparent problem.
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