Long article in tomorrow's NYT:
Bridges across the country carry similar deficiencies. At 309 major bridges on navigable waterways in the United States, inspections in recent years have found protection systems around bridge foundations that were deteriorating, potentially outdated or nonexistent, leaving the structures perilously exposed to ship strikes.
At just one such bridge:
The Lewis and Clark Bridge has towered above the Columbia River for nearly a century, its rugged half-mile truss serving as a gateway for logging trucks and beach vacationers crossing between Washington and Oregon.
Decades ago, to protect against wayward vessels that could threaten the structure, crews installed timber shields around the bridge piers that rise up out of the water. But even as the cargo ships chugging up the Pacific Northwest’s largest river began to grow in size, the timbers rotted away, leaving the bridge vulnerable to disaster.
"If a ship hits one of those piers, it’s gone,” said Jerry Reagor, a semiretired contractor who lives near the bridge and has spent years pressing transportation officials to install new protections. The state views the risk of calamity as low and the cost of preventing it to be high.
I wonder what advice the folks in Baltimore might offer 
"A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity, an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty” ---Sir Winston Churchill
"Political extremism involves two prime ingredients: an excessively simple diagnosis of the world's ills, and a conviction that there are identifiable villains back of it all." ---John W. Gardner
“You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.” ---C. S. Lewis
...Ben
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