Unliplocked Sam Does It To Eddie again

There would seem now to be little to be concerned about respecting the Ambassador Bridge after the recent tragedies in the US. In fact, it may be one of the safest bridges in all of North America.

One of the world's experts in bridges and tunnels--I am sure if you asked him that, he would confirm it---, while not saying it directly, must be implying that the Ambassador Bridge could be the model for all bridges, whether public or private! Of course, he did not use its name.

Read the transcript below to ascertain why he must have been talking about the Ambassador Bridge. It was on the TODAY TV show from NBC News.

His TV remarks are shocking! He has made a mockery IN HIS OWN WORDS of the comments he has made several times in Windsor about the Ambassador Bridge being a concern.

Frankly, if he can say one thing in Windsor and something that seems to refute what he said here on national television in the US then I intend to ignore anything he has to say on the border file. I intend to view his Presentation as nothing more than another device used by Eddie to stall the process to Windsor's detriment.

Read the following and tell me if this does not make you furious. Frankly, it is an attack on how Governments handle "public" bridges as well:

• Sam Schwartz is the former chief engineer for the New York City Department of Transportation.
  
  Mister Schwartz, good morning to you. You and I…
  
  Schwartz:
  Good morning.
  
  Vieira:
  …go back a long way here in the City.
  
  Schwartz:
  Yes, we sure do.
  
  Vieira:
  I know you don’t want to cause bridge phobia, but…
  
  Schwartz:
  Right.
  
  Vieira:
  …it may be too late. Lot of people getting up this morning…
  
  Schwartz:
  Yes.
  
  Vieira:
  …wondering, worrying that the bridge they might have to cross—to go to work, to go to the store, whatever—could possibly collapse. Do they have a, a legitimate worry?
  
  Schwartz:
  Well, they have a legitimate worry in the sense that their government officials should be taking care of these bridges. No government official should accept anything above one percent in terms of structurally-deficient.
  
  Vieira:
  But we’re close to thirteen percent—seventy thousand bridges in this country. How did we reach that point?
  
  Schwartz:
  We reached that point because we neglected our infrastructure. We didn’t do the very basic things. A bridge is like a machine. It needs to be cleaned; it needs to be oiled; it needs to be lubricated in various parts. It moves with a load—it goes up and down; it slides with the changes in temperature. And we need to treat it properly. Ima, imagine driving your car without ever oiling it, greasing it and waiting until the engine seizes up. That’s what we’ve done with our bridges.
  
  Vieira:
  And, now, we are trying to play catch-up in the, in the wake of this collapse. I know the federal government has, uh, has asked all states who have this kind of arch trush—truss bridge, like the one that collapsed, to examine those bridges. What is it about the design of those bridges that make them more dangerous?
  
  Schwartz:
  In engineering terms, we, we call that—them fracture-critical bridges, meaning that if there’s a single failure of a member of the bridge or steel beam, the entire bridge can come tumbling down. In the late 1980s, these were identified; and most of those bridges were bridges built post-World War II. So, if you’re going over a bridge that was built prior to World War II, you’re probably in pretty good shape.
  
  The bridges built in the ‘50s and ‘60s and 7’0s were the sleekest. It was the beginning of the use of computers in bridges, and the result is we didn’t get bridges with redundancy.
  
  Vieira:
  So, a bridge like this would never be built like nowadays?
  
  Schwartz:
  Nobody would build a bridge nowadays without having redundancy. So, you lose a beam, the bridge stands. Manhattan Bridge—I lost four consecutive beams on my watch; the bridge still stood.
  
  Vieira:
  It stands. When you were a bridge inspector here in New York, you had what you called “the intensive care list.” When you would put a bridge on that list, what did it mean?
  
  Schwartz:
  Well, I had, uh, twenty bridges that I actually had to close; and I had to close the Williamsburg Bridge. And when I put it on intensive care, it’s just like you put somebody in intensive care in the hospital. I had instrumentation measuring, uh, the bridge—the steel in the bridge and how it was being stretched in millionths of an inch, and making sure that there were no additional cracks, no additional failures in terms of the wires holding the bridge. We’re gonna need to do that.
  
  Vieira:
  This particular bridge that collapsed—may not be a fair question to ask you, but, if you had been the bridge inspector in Minneapolis, was that the kind of bridge that would have been put on intensive care, give what we know about inspections in the past few years on this bridge?
  
  Schwartz:
  Yeah, uh, it’s hard to say exactly without ever having inspected the bridge. But it had fatigue cracks. Cracks are, uh, the most worrisome thing for a bridge engineer. We don’t know enough about the science of the—speed of propagation of cracks. A crack can go from a quarter of an inch to five inches overnight. That’s what’s scary about it.
  
  Vieira:
  And, also, so many of these inspections—correct me if I’m wrong—are, are visual.
  
  Schwartz:
  Yes. We, we’re, we’re in the Dark Ages when it comes to inspections. I would say well over ninety-five percent of inspections are visual. We need to have instrumentation; and there are instruments now that can measure cracks on bridges and see how quickly they propagate.
  
  Vieira:
  Seems to me that we’ve got two problems here. We have an aging infrastructure in this country, and we don’t seem to have the funds or the wherewithal to repair our bridges. Are we playing Russian roulette with our bridges in this country?
  
  Schwartz:
  Well, well, the, the second part is, is, is a funny answer that I’m gonna give you. We need less money. What do I mean by that is we need to spend the money wisely. We have to spend it on maintenance. If you pay a toll, by the way, on a bridge, your bridge is safe. They, they’re taking care of it; they’re doing the daily maintenance.
  
  It’s when we give up the daily people that maintain the bridges that we get into a position where we then have to replace a bridge. So, I found it cheaper to take care of the bridge than to wait for replacement.
  
  Vieira:
  Sam Schwartz, thank you so much for your insight. Greatly appreciate it.
  
  Schwartz:
  You’re welcome.

The fact that the Ambassador Bridge is about 80 years old turns out to be a virtue not a negative. The bridges in good shape are generally the pre-WW II bridges.

Also, as I have said before, there is a reason why private enterprise looks after their infrastructure: it makes them money!

Yes it is the crass profit motive that NDPers like Brian Masse loathe that may make us feel better when crossing the Bridge. So when you hear Brian say to end tolls or keep them artificially low in the interest of the public, remind him of this transcript.

Heck, don't take my word for it, ask the expert of the City of Windsor, NYC's Sam Schwartz!