This all smells of tight black leather.
Everyone awake in the mid-1990s remembers the infamous scene in a Los Angeles courtroom of ex-NFL star O.J. Simpson surprisingly struggling to fit the lone confiscated material of murder over his hand. Never mind the fact he was wearing thick latex underneath that tight black glove, the result had Simpson’s legal team turning the entire event into a jury-turning advertising campaign with the slogan, “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.”
Prior to the interim report from the NTSB on the I-35W bridge collapse being released, I was expecting a firebomb of accusations.
Instead, there was barely a spat. The interim report concluded that the gusset plates were designed too thin back when drawings were scratched in the 1960s. The main culprit is as dead as Nicole Brown Simpson—bridge designer Sverdrup & Parcel ceases to exist.
My crime nose is far from that of a bloodhound’s, but something foul is creating a head-jerk reaction. Now, I realize this is only an interim report and that more accusing details could follow, but I also get the feeling this will be it. Mn/DOT, and the original contractor, can both take a multi-prayer-answering sigh of relief, tap the officials on the back and vow to find the real killer—or in this case spend the rest of their waking days supporting the NTSB finding. A future book deal also is not out of the question.
Allow me to sprinkle a few prosecution-favoring “Kaelins” onto this heaping pile. As you remember, Kato Kaelin was a star for Simpson’s defense, creating just enough disturbance on the witness stand to throw haze over some key points.
If the gusset plates were indeed too thin, don’t you think the contractor, which I am assuming had extensive experience in steel-truss construction, should have tossed them down at the feet of Mn/DOT officials with a snarl of, “These will never work”? And if it wasn’t the contractor, perhaps Mn/DOT itself should have whispered a few lines of “Wait a minute here.”
I have dealt with hundreds of contractors and designers and have been on many jobsites in my career, and most are hyper-sensitive when it comes to elements not adding up. If there is a problem, the problem is dealt with immediately and with vigor.
Let’s say the skinny supports made it past both the contractor and everyone else associated with the project at the time of construction. It still does not explain the poorly marked course of action taken by inspectors for over 40 years. Admittedly, fatigue cracking linked to gusset plates can be rather difficult to find and to link, but documents of inspections of the fatal bridge point to one issue or another that should have led to a severe pat down of the structure.
Experts say more than one killer took down Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman on that tragic night, and I know one or two bridge specialists who believe the guilty in Minneapolis could fill a jail cell.
And just where is the frantic call at the state DOT level to further inspect steel-truss bridges in the U.S.? I believe there are over 700 such structures with gusset plates as gaunt as the one in Minneapolis, and I have yet to hear of any massive recall. Oh wait, I did receive word that the state of Wisconsin dug in deep and inquired about the installation of monitoring systems on all of its traffic-carrying steel. However, officials were only willing to slap on a fraction of the sensors needed for effective measurement. This is not the kind of drive I was expecting. It looks more like a Bronco trying to escape blame on a California expressway.
