Posted: Wednesday, 25 March 2009 22:26, Edited: Wednesday, 25 March 2009 22:28
by Dave Mindeman
I want to be clear that I am not, for the most part, a conspiracy theorist. I don't get into JFK plots or Elvis spottings. One thing is for sure, I don't trust government pronouncements... but I consider that healthy skepticism rather than tin foil hat behavior.
But, there is one thing I have never been convinced of and that is the I-35 Bridge NTSB Report. To be honest, I think the whole investigation has been a political sham.
Which is why I have been waiting for the civil suits to challenge some of those assumptions. Well, the time for that is here.
As noted in this news item from MPR, attorneys for the victims are beginning to speak out....
Attorney: NTSB Is Wrong About Bridge Collapse
Now, I am not naive enough to believe that statements coming from attorneys are unbiased information. Of course they want to prove their case. However, this seems to be the only method we are going to have that will challenge the NTSB final report.
Some of the questions they raise are questions that has troubled me as well. They hired their own experts to evaluate the information:
A consortium of lawyers hired the international consulting firm Thorton Tomasetti to investigate the collapse.
This firm has impeccable engineering credentials and they offered the following conflicting conclusion:
He said that engineers concluded that the starting point for the collapse was not a faulty gusset plate, as the NTSB found, but a horizontal steel beam called a chord.
I fully understand that the conclusions reached by a hired agency can often be construed to reach a favorable client outcome. I am a pharmacist and always view drug studies funded by a the developing company with a large degree of skepticism.
But, we haven't had much access to that "second opinion" when it comes to the I-35 Bridge. The supposed "parallel" investigation ordered by Governor Pawlenty eventually merged into the "official" version of the NTSB.....and no public testimony was accepted.
But here is the important part of the article as far as I am concerned (emphasis mine):
Construction materials on the bridge at the time of the collapse put too much stress on the bridge, he said. Messerly (one of the victims attorneys) said the bridge's roller bearings were frozen, so it couldn't shift to relieve the stress.
"That was well known by the consulting agency hired by the state, and because the bridge would not expand and move with the heat, it caused this catastrophic failure," Messerly said.
Instead of shifting with the heat and weight, the beams took on the pressure, and eventually one of them, the "L9-L11 west," fractured.
Those frozen roller bearings have always troubled me. Their purpose is to "shift weight". On that day, there was an extraordinarily heavy load. Heat and weight were high....too high. The bearings were designed to spread the weight and ease the stress. But they could not function. And it was known, by inspectors for some time, that they were not functioning.
If that was their function, why wasn't it fixed? And why has it never been discussed in the official reports? The bearings had a purpose, did they not? If they were not important to the bridge, then why did they exist?
There is little doubt that this bridge had a design flaw, but I suspect that a number of other bridges function with design flaws as well.
But this particular bridge held up for 40 plus years. But on August 1, 2007 this bridge went down. Why that day? Why that time? Have those questions been answered fully?
The NTSB investigation came to its conclusion. They don't see a need to go any furthur.
But that is why we have the courts. The legal system asks all the questions and sifts through all the possible answers.
And, I, for one, am glad that option is available. Truth is seldom found in the narrowly focused discipline of a closed investigation. Real truth sometimes has to be found in the messy, adversarial venue of our legal system.
So, let's find that truth.
(For more thoughts on this subject, check out this post from November 23, 2008)
