‘Sickening that Republicans are now blaming Joe Biden’s infrastructure bill for this bridge accident. The sheer gall and naked opportunism and idiocy,’ epidemiologist says

‘Sickening that Republicans are now blaming Joe Biden’s infrastructure bill for this bridge accident. The sheer gall and naked opportunism and idiocy,’ epidemiologist says

Republicans are facing criticism for attempting to blame the Baltimore Bridge collapse on President Joe Biden’s infrastructure bill.

The Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsed on Tuesday after a cargo ship crashed into it.  Six construction workers are presumed dead.

South Carolina Representative Nancy Maceappeared on the rightwing channel Newsmax on Tuesday when she was asked why there are still old bridges and roads in the US after the passing of legislation to upgrade them.

  • AA5B@lemmy.world
    2·
    3 months ago

    I used to think in absolutes like that, but here’s another one: that accident was so rare, that there is no point in preparing for exactly that. Yes, there should be responsibility, especially if it was preventable, but infrastructure needs to look beyond any specific accident

    It’s more important to see what we can do about accidents like that, in a much wider sense, since those will happen.

    • collision protection will prevent catastrophe in many accidents like that, even if this one would have been impossible to block. Do you really think accidents only happen to larger ships, moving at speed, with only head on collisions that can’t be deflected?
    • different construction of the bridge might make any such catastrophe less catastrophic, even by limiting how much of it fell
    • requiring tugs to stand by until past the bridge would have given them at least a chance to try to prevent the collision
    • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_cause_analysis

    Actions like these could help, even before we figure out what happened with the ship and whether there are ways to reduce the chances in the future or to recover from such outages

    I’m sure they’ll look at ways to improve disaster response and communication, although it seems like that worked really well. This was a textbook example of how a quick response saved lives and a good lesson on reinforcing that