12-16-2008, 05:50 PM
Of the 600,000 public road bridges in the country, about 12 percent are classified as structurally deficient. Any of these bridges could collapse if conditions were right, like the bridge in Minnesota did. I know a bridge engineer and he said that the industry has been asking the government to address this problem through the last two administrations. The bridges built before the late sixties all need to be updated to prevent a similar disaster. The sort of manpower required to adapt existing bridges, planning and implementing and the physical labor, isn't exactly what I would call "digging ditches".