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Five Thousand Pounds of Steel are Falling

  • October 30, 2009

San Francisco Bay Bridge 103009Drivers on San Francisco’s Bay Bridge were greeted by 5,000 pounds of metal on Wednesday when a recently repaired eyebar snapped under pressure from high winds.

Unlike the 2007 bridge collapse tragedy in Minneapolis, no one was killed and only one motorist suffered minor injuries. A lucky break since the accident happened during rush hour on a bridge that services 280,000 commuters every day.

This isn’t the first newsworthy item in the Bay Bridge’s history, as a 50-foot section of the upper level collapsed onto the bottom level during the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. The image was quickly beamed to millions of homes around the U.S. as they were tuning in for Game 2 of the World Series.

Though a major disaster was averted this time, the clock is ticking unless measures are taken to rebuild, reinforce and restore America’s crumbling infrastructure.

One in four of America’s bridges are either structurally deficient or functionally obsolete, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers. Overall, they rate America’s 600,000 bridges a "D."  The ASCE estimates there is a nearly a $7 billion gap between what is needed to be invested in order to improve conditions versus what actually is being invested.

Hopefully, that and similar domestic infrastructure spending gaps will start to close before the problem becomes a crisis.

All opinions expressed and data provided are subject to change without notice. Some of these opinions may not be appropriate to every investor. #09-760


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