The Bay Bridge

I don't know if you heard but we have been having a bit of trouble with the Bay Bridge, lately.

They found a crack in a rather important thingy which holds the bridge together during some other project Labor Day weekend.

And they did a quick fix job then, which has since broken - dropping a couple tons worth metal on the road deck in the process.




So a second round of repair stuff is ongoing.
A bit more stress modeling is being applied to the repair components needed to truss up this icon of the industrial revolution.
Since the intellectual revolution, nobody seems to know how to make the parts to fix the bridge, I guess.


That really wracks my head a bit.

The parts for the last "fix" were fabricated in Arizona.

Really?
Here in this international port city there is not some shop that could make a big steel thingy?
I mean there are two national laboratories doing crazy atomic science stuff close by. There is a f'n NASA lab down the road. There are big oil refineries all over the place.
And they had to have a giant metal bit fabricated in Arizona and ship it in?

Yes, I suppose this is another rambling diatribe about how we don't make anything anymore.


We don't have an app for fixing the infrastructure which carries a half million cars a day.
We do have access to a million app's for the Iphone, but at best they will only allow us to make fart noises in the general direction of the bridge.


If the Chinese had built a knock off bridge, we could probably get the part from them.