Any good news?
 

Late night news has just finished here. I have just seen the footage of the bridge going down in Minneapolis. That was sudden. How damned lucky, 6 out of 8 lanes were closed for repairs. Still 20 or maybe more still missing.

Hundreds dead in floods in Bangladesh. Again.

Seems like half of Greece is on fire.

And today, while driving some one else's vehicle, I hit a rut, and the entire horn assembly fell into my lap. I'm driving down the road, the dog is barking at the horn, the horn is blowing and won't stop.:laugh:

So, how was your day.

There too?

I know half the Canary Islands are on fire after some idiot park ranger set fires to try and save his job :confused:

Oh god it never ends!I had a head-ache yesterday and it didn't ends.I took two pill's when I came home from buying grocery's then it didn't stop so before bed I took one more pill and fell asleep and woke up without a head-ache (but I still remember the pain)

If you want to see something really dumb: Irish Police Hunt Railway Prank Youth (Sky News link)
The video mentioned in the article is available at pikey mikey (YouTube link) Clip contains bad language.

Of course, I do have to ask why there appears to be no staff or security at what is obviously a railway station.

This is why I flip by the news. I know enough to not be totally in the dark, but I can't take what passes for news these days. Sad statement to say I watched news more as a kid and teen than as an adult. I guess the good news is we're here to gripe about the bad news!

Maybe the good news is that televisions come with a remote control that lets you turn off the bad news. :D

What we are seeing is the drama phenomenon. In a population of more than six billion people, lots of bad things are happening all the time. The difference is now we have people out searching for bad news to spread around the world.

It doesn't help that the media don't want to draw a clear line between news, propaganda, information, disinformation, sick entertainment and regular entertainment.

Yes, the TV comes with a remote, but unfortunately I don't live alone, family members come in and talk at me. :rolleyes:

I get most of my news from the internet these days, but while checking stories about real news events, like bridge collapses and mass evacuations in the Canary Islands, it's hard to avoid the other stuff too.

I heard and am watching the news that there is a company is sending people to inspect bridges but don't have a license or know what they are doing.How do I like that?I am MAD!
And a prisoner escapes jail.

Exactly the same myself these days Mike. I must have just about every TV\internet news network bookmarked somewhere. Even ones in languages I haven't got a clue about. But, I do see a different view, of the same news items.
The big boys on the block here, are the Murdock and the Packer empires.
I'd like a second, third or even more opinions, if you don't mind.

The main thing I see, is that universally plentiful stupidity.

Ah, visitors have just swung into the drive. See ya!

Lol, I worked at a mall that was evacuated one day -- because a prisoner being transported jumped out of a deputy sheriff's car while stopped at a traffic light.

The prisoner ran into the mall because he had a relative who worked in the mall. This relative helped him remove the manacles (and I assume change clothes, those orange jumpsuits are quite eye catching) and he moved on to parts unknown.

A short time later, people came into the store where I worked talking about this escaped convict. Then word comes down from mall management that we're evacuating. I called the mall office and they said "fire emergency," so we all left. While standing around outside, we got the rest of the story!

Hmmm... considering that there are a fantastically high number of bridges in the world, it doesn't surprise me at all that some muck-raking reporter on your faithful Ayeverbless News variety show found an incident where there was a bridge inspector who didn't have the official license hanging on his wall. It's another example of how the news is no longer about news; it's just about the weird, the bizarre, the fringe.

I was snooping around, trying to find out how many bridges there on in the world, just to get a sense of the scale of the question. Pittsburgh says it is offically the city with the most bridges in the world, with 446 bridges. On the other hand, New York City claims to have 2,027 bridges.

Consider: Large cities have hundreds or thousands of bridges. This almost intelligible essay says that there are 19,355 cities in the United States if you have to include Pittsburgh. (So what's this thing with Pittsburgh?)

Just wild-guessing that the average city has about 100 bridges, that means there are about 2 million bridges in the cities of the United States. (That wouldn't include unincorporated rural areas.) It might be a million; might be ten million; but at least we have know that the number is hugely huge.

So, if you were a lazy, sensationalistic reporter looking for an opportunity to do some hate-mongering instead of having to find some real news to report, what are the chances that you would fail in your quest to find some kind of anomaly regarding the inspection of bridges?

Nope, it's nothing to get excited about.

In fact, the incredibly good news is that the reporter found only one incident, out of what must be hundreds of thousands of bridge inspectors in just the USA; and don't forget that the USA is only 5% of the total world's population.

Consider: Out of those umpty million bridges in the United States, how many have collapsed in the past year? In the last decade? In the last century? Bridge failures are momentous events in engineering history, but the number of notable bridge failures is at most in the dozens, definitely not in the hundreds. Dozens, out of millions of bridges; no doubt tens of millions in the world as a whole.

A bridge doesn't have to fail catastrophically to be dangerous. There are two bridges in Buffalo that periodically drop chunks of concrete onto the road below. They currently have nets hanging below them to catch anything that falls and are scheduled for replacement.

There are also other problems than bridges -- bridges are just the most spectacular. Every city in the US has outdated or overloaded water, sewage, electrical service, phone lines, etc. Unfortunately, when the budget crunch comes, "infrastructure maintenance and repair" is very easy to cut since it's not crucial and can be taken care of "next year," but "next year" never comes. Suddenly, people have sewage backing up into their basements every rainstorm, and you've got an acute problem that's probably more severe than it would have been if the system had been better maintained.

Remember that "structurally deficient" does not mean "considered dangerous", it just means it no longer has enough excess load bearing capacity.

I'll be very interested in the NTSB report, and I'm curious whether this being a post war bridge might have any bearing on what happened. We just don't over engineer the way we did prewar.

Pittsburgh is called the City of Bridges
http://pittsburgh.about.com/cs/pictu...l_bridge_1.htm

There are 3 bridges within 20 miles of me that have already been slated for investigation because they are of similar design to the MN bridge. One of them, in my hometown, that I've crossed, literally, thousands and thousands of times.

Yep, Buffalo has 3 that will be investigated too. These aren't the ones that drop concrete chunks onto the road below.

Odd as this may seem, the ones that drop chunks may actually be quite safe to be on, just not under.

You have a good point there, Rose. Bridges and roads and stuff don't buy votes until they fail. That's a weakness of democracy, but I sure don't have any better ideas.

At least one of them isn't. The expansion joints at one end are frozen so all movement happens at the other. It's a real possibility that the bridge could contract enough to pull right off the support.

With that one, the words "scheduled for replacement" are tantamount to "criminal negligence". If it's in that state it should be closed and fixed, or closed and demolished. Immediately.

But of course the ensuing traffic problems might cause certain politicians to lose some votes.

They're waiting til next summer. Hopefully, the thing won't come down completely over the winter, when the worst contraction happens.