By Barry LePatner

New York, NY (July 2008)-It is hard to believe a year has passed since the tragic I-35W Bridge collapse in Minnesota, but it's true. August 1st marks the first anniversary of an event that showed how vulnerable America's infrastructure truly is. And if you'd assumed that since then federal and state government officials have burned the midnight oil trying to solve the problem, well, you'd be wrong. Construction attorney Barry LePatner says that the past year of inaction-which, incidentally, also saw more than 30 Midwest levee breaks that caused billions of dollars in damage and numerous bridge closings that resulted from inspections that followed the I-35W collapse-proves that our infrastructure wake-up call has fallen on deaf ears.

"There's a quote from the recent I-35W Bridge investigative report that reads, 'When a bridge collapses, so does public faith in government,'" says LePatner, coauthor of Structural & Foundation Failures (McGraw-Hill, 1982, coauthored with Sidney M. Johnson, P.E.) and author of Broken Buildings, Busted Budgets: How to Fix America's Trillion-Dollar Construction Industry(The University of Chicago Press, October 2007, ISBN-13: 978-0-226-47267-6, ISBN-10: 0-226-47267-1, $25.00). "I completely agree.

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Posted by boyang at July 31, 2008 5:29 PM