The bridge is falling!

I don't know about you, but, in the wake of the Minneapolis bridge disaster, I hear the sound of money printing.

I don't want to make light of a disaster, and the bridge collapse certainly fits that description.

But when a senator says "A bridge in the United States shouldn't just fall down," he's expressing an irrational and expensive intolerance for risk.

The GAO estimates it would cost $41.1 billion to replace or remediate the country's 200,000 substandard bridges. That's not a lot of money these days, really, even if the number's seriously lowballed. There's no telling what it'll be once the media and Congress get finished.

But will spending whatever it takes guarantee that a bridge in the United States won't just fall down? No.

New York City probably needs to replace all of its old subterranean steam pipes. Will repairing them all guarantee that another one won't blow up? No.

Our air traffic control system is supposedly decrepit and really ought to be using GPS for routing. If we replace it will it guarantee that your flight will never be late again? Of course not.

In Boston, they're replacing all the ceiling panels in a tunnel that opened in 1999, after one of them fell off and killed a driver. Will the new panels fall off too? Maybe.

It's being said that the Minneapolis bridge didn't have redundancy built into the design. Yet we've lost two space shuttles in just over 100 flights, and they've got quadruple redundancy built into the design.

We lost two skyscrapers in New York that were designed to withstand an airplane collision. The designers just didn't plan on the planes being full of fuel.

We have 100-car collisions on fog-shrouded highways that kill as many people as died on the bridge, yet all Congress can focus on auto-wise is ways to make our cars flimsier to satisfy green gas mileage dreams.

Bridges aren't the beginning and end of our infrastructure problems. If we want to fix everything that needs fixing, we're not talking about $40 billion. Probably 10 times that or more.

If America wants to spend the money, it's fine with me. That's not the point.

My point is that when America wakes up in the morning, some number of us will be in the morgue when the rest of us go to bed at night. That $41.1 billion is the estimate to build bridges with 99.9 percent confidence that they won't fall down after a bajillion car crossings. Beware of the politician who wants to eliminate that last tenth of a percent of risk. We just don't have that much money.

I guess I should invite some people over to read this moronic post: HotAir notes the Bush-blaming has begun; Kim has updates; and Iowahawk's summer rerun has slow motion shots of the General Sundqvist '69 Volvo jumping over broken bridges and misty fjords.