The only thing more shocking than the total collapse of the Key Bridge in Baltimore last week was the number of speculative conjectures stated by elected and appointed officials in the hours after it was struck by a container ship. Federal and state officials almost immediately declared it had not been a terrorist attack. While there has so far been no evidence whatsoever showing the crash was intentional, there had not been adequate time to investigate sufficiently to entirely rule it out at the time they made that declaration. More importantly, the claim was made - and then repeated ad nauseum by the media - that any type of bridge would have completely collapsed in this scenario. An investigative report published by The Washington Post this past Saturday has determined that claim to be false.
A collapse of a similar bridge over Tampa Bay in Florida following a ship collision in 1980 resulted in federal authorities alerting highway agencies to review all bridges, to find out how many might have the same vulnerability, the Post learned. An engineer with the Maryland Department of Transportation confirmed to The Baltimore Sun that year that the Key Bridge was one of the state's bridges that fell into that category. "I'm talking about the main supports, a direct hit - it would knock it down," he told the Sun.
Despite learning this in 1980, state and federal officials took no action to construct barriers or islands around the Key Bridge's support columns. "They had all this time to realize the danger, and it appears to me they did nothing about it," Florida attorney Steve Yerrid told the Post. Yerrid was a lawyer for the pilot of the ship that struck the Sunshine Skyway Bridge in Tampa Bay. "Maryland officials should have moved aggressively to protect their bridges from collisions, despite the costs," the Post cited Yerrid as saying.
National Transportation Safety Board Chair Jennifer Homendy also put to rest the idea that "no bridge could have survived this crash." She said the bridge designs of today have "redundancy" built in, so that the loss of one pier doesn't cause a total collapse. In contrast, Maryland officials knew that the Key Bridge was among the thousands of "fracture critical" bridges in America. "Fracture critical" means that "if one key piece fails, part or all of the bridge would likely collapse," the Post reported.
America's crumbling infrastructure is often in the news, but rarely in state and federal budgets. We know that trillions of dollars that could have been spent on new bridges and highway maintenance, high speed rail, utility networks, healthcare, poverty, housing for the homeless and other essential needs have instead gone to costly wars overseas, as just one example of nonsensical spending priorities.
Senator Chuck Schumer is reportedly having difficulty finding $10 million to correct major infrastructure issues at the National Institute of Standards and Technology campus right here in Gaithersburg, deficiencies that are currently threatening national security and the health of NIST employees. But the U.S. government had no difficulty finding $75 billion for the Ukraine War, at least $3 trillion for the Iraq War, $2.3 trillion for the Afghanistan War, $2.2 billion of weapons for rebels against the government of Syria, $17 billion on a military adventure in the former Yugoslavia, a $100 million drone base in Niger...the list goes on and on, and most of the money goes into the private profit pockets of the military-industrial complex. None of those outlays has resulted in a successful geopolitical victory for the United States.
At the same time, Maryland elected officials have spent big and repeatedly raised taxes since 1980. The completely-preventable collapse of the Key Bridge forces us to now evaluate just which frivolous things - and campaign donors - our representatives have spent all that tax revenue on instead.
In many photo-ops over the last week, our elected officials have striven to give us the impression they are here to save us from an economic catastrophe that also cost at least six human lives. As the Post report proves, they were actually the problem in the first place, having failed to act to modify or replace the Key Bridge for 44 years.
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