The Mississippi River bridge that collapsed in Minnesota on Wednesday was identified as being structurally deficient nearly twenty years ago yet remained in service and the basic flaws went unaddressed even as inspectors remained convinced that there was no imminent danger. There are in the neighbourhood of 70,000 bridges in the country which have the same rating. My old home state of Pennsylvania leads the nation in structurally deficient bridges with nearly 6,000 of the buggers or about 8.5% of the nation's total. Unfortunately the Department of Transportation website doesn't provide a listing of these bridges to allow you to avoid them on the way to work.
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