Thursday, August 2, 2007

Bridge Disaster

I couldn't believe my eyes last night when I got home, turned on CNN and saw the bridge disaster. What an awful thing. My first thought was of my friend who lives in Minneapolis, and I emailed her right away. She wrote me back this morning and said they are all fine, and she doesn't think she knows anyone who was involved in the tragedy. Hard to believe that you would just be driving and suddenly finding your vehicle falling into the water. The story about the schoolbus is just amazing. It is like the bus flew to safety. So glad those children are fine. Hope they don't have lasting effects from this. I was flipping between CNN, MSNBC, and Fox to see the coverage, and as expected, Fox was the only one that mentioned the "T" word in connection with what might have caused the disaster.

When I first heard about the bridge failure, I thought of metal fatigue right away. I used to work with engineers and learned the term there. There was a meeting we all went to, maybe 10-15 years ago, where the engineers were talking about metal fatigue and how the bridges and other infrastructure in the U.S. were getting seriously close to being dangerous. And that was 10-15 years ago! I am assuming that maybe some bridges have been repaired since then, but it sounds like there are still quite a large number that are unsafe.

Well, I better get back to studying for the MPRE!

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