No Lie, where is all the money going we ask the 2% corporate golden greedy guts that OWNS most of the world as the priority one subheadings below remain in LIMBOPriority One A: energy evolution - stagnant and dead with a 100 year old equation, E=MC2, unexpanded, unevolved, petrified as in stone
Priority One B: Survival Criteria for increasingly complex, energy intensive 'holistic' global systems - nonexistent. (these criteria are derived directly from evolving energy stages beyond the caveman approach to nuclear energies - but then, that's The Trouble With Physics and pending trouble with civilization's future survival)
Unstable Bridges, Underfunded Facilities
Aug. 3, 2007
(CBS) After the catastrophe in Minneapolis, decrepit bridges are
getting a closer look and coming up short, reports CBS News correspondent Nancy Cordes. From California to Connecticut on Friday, inspectors could be seen hanging off bridges, floating below them, and peering at them with binoculars. "You never know when you're gonna find a crack," one inspector says. What they're seeing are spans that appear to be held together by little more than hope—like one propped up by two by fours in New Jersey. Inspectors also found rusted metal in Maryland and decaying concrete in California. Coming under the greatest scrutiny are the 750 bridges in the U.S. that are similar in design to the one that collapsed. A third of those steel deck-truss bridges are rated structurally deficient—just like the Minneapolis bridge was before its structure failed. "It's like when you bend a paper clip," Ohio structural engineer Chuck Cvitkovich says. "If you keep bending that paper clip, eventually it's going to break." Today and every day, the most sophisticated piece of equipment that's typically used to inspect bridges is the naked eye. "I clean the weld with a brush and wipe the dirt off to make a visual inspection to make sure there's not a crack," and inspector in Arkansas said. But visual inspections don't mean much if they're wrong. The Federal Highway Administration estimates that 56 percent of the time, bridges are rated as better or worse than they actually are. There is new technology that uses electric currents to look for cracks inside metal beams—kind of like an EKG for a bridge. Only a couple of states use it. At Los Alamos National Laboratories in New Mexico, they've developed a tiny helicopter that could send signals to and get readings from sensors embedded in bridges. But it's not ready, and it's expensive. Nick Roper is the chief bridge engineer for Northern Virginia, where 30 bridges have been deemed structurally deficient. "If you had enough funding, what would you do that you can't do now?" Cordes asks. "I would replace every deficient bridge that's in my district," Roper says. And that's the real dilemma facing transportation officials from coast to coast. Even if all those inspections do uncover structural problems, where will the money come to fix them? As CBS News correspondent Sharyl Attkisson reports, funding the nation's infrastructure is all a matter of priorities. Out of the $2.7 trillion dollar federal budget, it's estimated only around $50 billion dollars a year goes for infrastructure – just a tiny slice of the pie. Experts say what's needed is $210 billion dollars a year for five years just for upkeep. And the need is felt in all 50 states. Coast-to-coast there have been sewage leaks, killer chunks of falling concrete, broken pipes in the Midwest, and contaminated water in Washington D.C. New Jersey loses an astonishing 20 million gallons of drinking water a day from leaky pipes. But when it comes to spending federal dollars, sometimes priorities seem out of whack ....full text
Aug. 3, 2007
(CBS) After the catastrophe in Minneapolis, decrepit bridges are
getting a closer look and coming up short, reports CBS News correspondent Nancy Cordes. From California to Connecticut on Friday, inspectors could be seen hanging off bridges, floating below them, and peering at them with binoculars. "You never know when you're gonna find a crack," one inspector says. What they're seeing are spans that appear to be held together by little more than hope—like one propped up by two by fours in New Jersey. Inspectors also found rusted metal in Maryland and decaying concrete in California. Coming under the greatest scrutiny are the 750 bridges in the U.S. that are similar in design to the one that collapsed. A third of those steel deck-truss bridges are rated structurally deficient—just like the Minneapolis bridge was before its structure failed. "It's like when you bend a paper clip," Ohio structural engineer Chuck Cvitkovich says. "If you keep bending that paper clip, eventually it's going to break." Today and every day, the most sophisticated piece of equipment that's typically used to inspect bridges is the naked eye. "I clean the weld with a brush and wipe the dirt off to make a visual inspection to make sure there's not a crack," and inspector in Arkansas said. But visual inspections don't mean much if they're wrong. The Federal Highway Administration estimates that 56 percent of the time, bridges are rated as better or worse than they actually are. There is new technology that uses electric currents to look for cracks inside metal beams—kind of like an EKG for a bridge. Only a couple of states use it. At Los Alamos National Laboratories in New Mexico, they've developed a tiny helicopter that could send signals to and get readings from sensors embedded in bridges. But it's not ready, and it's expensive. Nick Roper is the chief bridge engineer for Northern Virginia, where 30 bridges have been deemed structurally deficient. "If you had enough funding, what would you do that you can't do now?" Cordes asks. "I would replace every deficient bridge that's in my district," Roper says. And that's the real dilemma facing transportation officials from coast to coast. Even if all those inspections do uncover structural problems, where will the money come to fix them? As CBS News correspondent Sharyl Attkisson reports, funding the nation's infrastructure is all a matter of priorities. Out of the $2.7 trillion dollar federal budget, it's estimated only around $50 billion dollars a year goes for infrastructure – just a tiny slice of the pie. Experts say what's needed is $210 billion dollars a year for five years just for upkeep. And the need is felt in all 50 states. Coast-to-coast there have been sewage leaks, killer chunks of falling concrete, broken pipes in the Midwest, and contaminated water in Washington D.C. New Jersey loses an astonishing 20 million gallons of drinking water a day from leaky pipes. But when it comes to spending federal dollars, sometimes priorities seem out of whack ....full text
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