Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Covering Up the Cause of the Minneapolis Bridge Collapse

This story just proves that no federal or state investigations are to be trusted.

They are cover-ups, all of them!

Sorry, readers, but it's the TRUTH!!!!


"Controversy Dogs Inquiry on Bridge Collapse" by MATTHEW L. WALD

WASHINGTON — The National Transportation Safety Board’s working theory about last summer’s bridge collapse in Minneapolis — that it was caused by a design error four decades ago — has run into a peculiar problem: it contradicts much public belief.

Just like
WTC 7 and 9/11, folks!

This government is INCAPABLE of telling the truth, isn't it, readers?


The conventional wisdom is that the Interstate 35W bridge, aged and due for major maintenance, collapsed because of neglect. Surely inspectors had missed something, or their higher-ups had delayed needed repairs until the 40-year-old span plunged into the Mississippi, the popular belief goes.

State officials and engineering executives all over the country have joined in the chorus, arguing that the collapse, in which 13 people died and more than 100 were injured, demonstrates a need for expanded maintenance budgets. On Tuesday, the treasurer of Massachusetts said his state should spend $600 million on bridges to “avoid a future Minnesota incident.”

But the safety board, in issuing interim recommendations related to the collapse, said on Jan. 15 that the problem had not been age or money. The design of the bridge that failed was no good from the day the span opened, the board said: an engineer in the mid-1960s had specified gusset plates, the big sheets of steel that tie girders together, of half-inch thickness when they should have been an inch thick.

Yeah, sort of like the fires caused the WTC towers to collapse!

Even though that never before nor since had ever happened.

Is it not strange that architects and engineers didn't reexamine all their building designs -- if fire indeed felled the WTC towers?

If this is NTSB report is true and the bridge had a DESIGN FLAW then NONE of us are safe!

The architects and engineers need to examine ALL BRIDGES then!

It's like the fuel tank on
TWA 800.

Just a random event and problem that never occurred again?

Wake up, America, and smell the government lies of bullshit!!!

Either that, or I gotta a bridge I can sell you, readers!

When the board’s chairman said this was a problem that field inspectors could not have been expected to find, a senior Minnesota congressman, James L. Oberstar, the Democrat who heads the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, accused him of jumping to conclusions. Mr. Oberstar, whose committee oversees the safety board, said dismissing the idea that rust had played a role was “inappropriate” at this stage, months before the board’s final report on the collapse.

In fact, the board’s chairman, Mark V. Rosenker, noted in announcing the recommendations that it had not yet reached a definitive finding as to all factors in the collapse.

NIST and WTC 7!!!

But Mr. Rosenker also said, when a reporter asked about corrosion or cracking, “We have no reason to believe at this time that that played a role in the failure of the gusset plates or the rest of the bridge.” He said the fact that the gusset plates were too thin to begin with was “the critical part of this issue.”

So was it the design or wasn't it, double-talker?


.... Robert Meek, a Democratic public relations consultant in the Twin Cities... said that the safety board might be playing down what he described as Minnesota’s failure to learn from the damaging of a bridge in Ohio that had thin gusset plates and corrosion alike....

The board, the government’s premier organization in engineering forensics, was created as an independent agency in 1967 to insulate it from government bureaus whose work it critiques, and has only occasionally faced criticism of its findings. After TWA Flight 800, on its way from New York to Paris, exploded off Long Island in 1996, a dedicated cadre of accident buffs and conspiracy theorists maintained that the cause was a bomb or a missile and not, contrary to the board’s finding, a mechanical failure.

I'm surprised the Times even mentioned the alternative TRUTH about TWA 800, readers.

Is there still hope for them?

I wish I could feel that there was, readers -- but I've given up on AmeriKa's MSM!!!!