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COMMENTARY BY THE HON. RUFUS PECKHAM - PennDOT, acting more like Chicken Little than a responsible arm of state government, has ordered the "emergency" closure of the Birmingham Bridge, supposedly due to an unexplained drop of up to 8 inches in a portion of the span over the Monongahela River. Although PennDOT isn't saying it, it is strongly implying that if the bridge isn't fixed, it might collapse.The closure is severely impacting South Side restaurants, but the gastronomical delights of Western Pennsylvania citizenry aren't PennDOT's concern. Making itself look important is.
Frankly, from the way they're talking, it sounds as if the PennDOT engineers never had a bridge give out from under them.
While 8 inches is a huge, vast, enormous distance when it comes to human matters, thank you very much, it is nothing in terms of a bridge. That didn't stop the PennDOT engineers from sprinkling their announcement about the closure with all sorts of pseudo-intellectual, scary engineer lingo that's supposed to make us forget that every one of these guys tried, to no avail, to get into medical school. According to PennDOT, a girder supporting the approach span of the bridge has slipped off a "rocker bearing." PennDOT said that this caused the bridge to fall 7-3/4 inches. Rocker bearings, according to PennDOT, are supposed to move slightly in response to changes in the weather but, according to PennDOT, rocker bearings are not supposed to slide and drop completely.
On and on PennDOT blathered, one twisted assertion cascaded upon the next until they collapsed upon each other to reveal a Rorschach inkblot of acute hysteria.
But objective analysis, not histrionics, is what is lacking here. I'm no engineer but bridges crack, decay, list and, yes, collapse, all the time. The mere fact that virtually all such bridges where these things occur are significantly older than the Birmingham Bridge is completely beside the point. And yes, if the bridge collapsed, it might kill someone. But it hasn't happened yet, has it?
If the killjoys at PennDOT had not forced the bridge to close, the chances are remote -- probably less than 45-50% -- that anything bad would ever happen with that bridge. The restaurants would flourish, and no one would have been the wiser. You heard it here first.
Of course, the sane and practical approach doesn't make the squeamish populace exclaim, "Thank goodness PennDOT's on the job keeping us safe!" And we fear that's really what this is all about.
