Too Big to Fall: America's Failing Infrastructure and the Way Forward
The deadly collapse of the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis awakened Americans to the perils of our aging infrastructure, but as LePatner points out, it was a disaster years in the making. In this painstaking analysis of both the Minneapolis tragedy and other structural failures, he reveals that government failures at every level have resulted in our reliance on roads and bridges that were never designed to sustain the volume of traffic we now generate. Politics plays a huge part here, but so does the problem of keeping the public interested in a vital yet dull subject. Citing Willa Cather’s Alexander’s Bridge, LePatner points out that “engineers were once a type of American cultural hero.” Poems were written about them; they remade the landscape and transformed the country. That was the era of “steel and concrete,” however, when expansion was the story that mattered. LaPatner makes it clear that today’s problems of management and maintenance are just as important, and require a similar commitment. Detailed and determined, this is a call to arms ignored at our own peril. --Colleen Mondor