More on the Democrats politicizing of the Minnesota bridge collapse

Captain Ed has done some investigating on some accusations prominent Minnesota Democrats (and others) have been making with regards to funding and inspections on Minnesota bridges in light of the I35W bridge collapse, and finds them wanting:

Yesterday, Senator Amy Klobuchar blamed the collapse of the I-35W bridge on a lack of highway funds — even though the 2005 highway bill increased federal funding to Minnesota by 46% over its five-year span. Apparently realizing that line of argument wouldn’t hold, Rep. James Oberstar accused MnDOT of being too cheap to use advanced technology for bridge inspections. He left out of his accusation that the technology hasn’t proven itself for that purpose:

On the House floor Friday, U.S. Rep. Jim Oberstar, D-Minn., accused MnDOT of turning down an opportunity to use a $200,000 high-tech inspection technology on the bridge that might have detected a fatal flaw. …

“Technology can discover microscopic cracks not visible to the naked eye and then measure their propagation and do the same with bridges,” he said on the House floor. “The Minnesota Department of Transportation was offered the opportunity to use that technology and I am disappointed that the state rejected the opportunity to use that technology to test the structural integrity of the bridge that collapsed.” …

John Schadl, Oberstar’s spokesman, said the congressman mentioned the incident because he is frustrated by the lack of investment in new technologies, at both the federal and state levels. But Oberstar does not know whether the company’s system would have detected any fatal flaws in the bridge.

“Nobody knows if this technology would have prevented this tragedy,” Schadl said.

Precisely. And do you know why nobody knows it? Because we don’t know why the bridge failed yet. We don’t know whether this system works as promised, either. Why can’t our Democrats in this state wait to find out what actually happened before leaping to conclusions as to what could have prevented it — especially on the floor of Congress?

Because it’s so much easier and politically convenient to throw out accusations you can’t substantiate at the time in hopes that either something will stick, or at the very least in hopes that people will remember more the seriousness of the allegation rather than whether or not it actually turned out to be true?

NC Cop says:

August 5, 2007 at 9:39 am

I thought I had read that the bridge was declared deficient in 1990. How strange that 8 years under the Clinton administration didn’t help fix it, but I guess we don’t want to talk about that.

Steve Haas says:

August 5, 2007 at 1:19 pm

I have lived in Minnesota for five years, more or less, and one thing I can say about it is that Minnesotans are rather anal about almost anything they do. I would be very surprised if anything was stinted on this bridge, especially inspections and repair.

The bigger problem is infrastructure, and that problem can be directly traced to Congress. We spend less on infrastructure than Congress scams on pork and earmarks every year. Bridge repair can always be put off, because no one expects any particular bridge to fail tomorrow, or even next year, so why not put off spending the money for later?

If you think this is bad, wait until we have another blackout. The electrical system in this country is in worse shape than the road system…and don’t even get me STARTED on the air control system.