© Andrea Leoni/GettyBridge collapse in Genoa, Italy
There's an old chestnut about infrastructure that goes:
Infrastructure is everything you don't notice-until it fails. It's a definition that works for any kind of infrastructure, too: big or small, visible or invisible, bridges and garage doors, electric grids and Wi-Fi routers.
Infrastructure is everything you take for granted. And you only notice that you take it for granted when it breaks.Lately, a lot of things have broken. In two incidents over the past two days, hundreds of people were injured or killed: An
elevated-highway bridge collapsed in Genoa, Italy, and a
pier gave out in Vigo, Spain, during a music festival.
The consequences are harrowing. In Genoa, cars dropped 150 feet to the earth as a span of the bridge fell underneath them. In Vigo, concertgoers were plunged into the sea, piled atop one another, when the boardwalk gave out.It's too early to know for certain what the causes were of the two collapses, but "structural problems" were
suspected at the Spanish boardwalk, and "signs of problems" had been observed on the Italian bridge. Those factors invoke concerns about
general infrastructural decline caused by deferred maintenance (usually from lack of funding). That's a familiar story everywhere. In the early-20th century, many structures were over-engineered to hold massive loads. But as civil engineering matured, and as demand for structures increased, the profession designed structures to be safe, but also quick to erect economically. Eventually, those compromises would come home to roost. In 2007, a highway bridge in Minneapolis collapsed, killing or injuring hundreds. But
even a decade later,
the nation's "aging infrastructure" remained, mostly having become a political talking point rather than a program for renewal.
Comment: If you allow the expression of every idea, whim and fancy with an 'everything goes' attitude, be very careful you don't open Pandora's box, because it will get out of hand very quickly. You only need to look towards the proliferation of dozens of gender pronouns as an example, or pedophiles attempts to piggyback off the LGBT movement in order to gain widespread acceptance. Every fringe element in the most obscure and twisted of corners of society are coming out of the woodwork lately and that should give people a reason to pause and think about whether this is what they want and what it means for the future.
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