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Nowhere to a Bridge
Here in Massachusetts, we may be dysfunctional leftists, but at least we aren’t as bad as Rhode Island.
I was roaming around YouTube and was spoon-fed this story about the replacement of the Washington Bridge in Providence. This isn’t a little bridge. It’s the westbound half of I-195, and is estimated to cost $300 million dollars. The are two RFPs (Request For Proposals). One for demolition and the other for replacement.
I am used to the bidding process, only not on this scale. The state notified 2,172 vendors. Notification isn’t unusual. What is strange is the number of notifications. I think they even asked the local flower shop, considering the number of requests. Sixty-seven companies downloaded the plans. There were fifty-two submitted questions. Nobody submitted a bid.
They have a tight schedule and are offering up to a $10M bonus for early completion. That also means a $10M penalty when you’re late. Governor McKee promised a “Day of Reckoning” for anyone already involved in the bridge project leading up to its closure. There are two law firms under a contingency fee arrangement earning 17% of any damages awarded.
By bidding for this project you have to know the lawsuits will begin against you immediately.
One time I bid and won a controls job for the DHS on the Canadian border. I knew they were going to be a big pain, so I threw an extra 25% on it. For what they put me through I should have doubled it. A pump was undersized and burnt itself out. I didn’t design the system, I just did the controls. On jobs like this, I import the entire specification as text into my program. I then write the code under each paragraph. Many times the spec is contradictory or redundant. My job is not to be creative, but to regurgitate the written word into code.
When this pump burnt out they wanted me to pay for its replacement. I asked them to show me what I did wrong. They couldn’t. What they did say was, “The intent was…,” and they also implied they have a team of lawyers waiting and I will lose. I will never bid on another DHS job again, even at double the price.
I went to my first WooSox game the other night. The WooSox are the Worcester Red Sox. They moved here from Pawtucket, RI in 2021, where they were known as the PawSox. The state paid an exorbitant amount of money to mow down a dilapidated section of Worcester to build Polar Park. The ballpark is very nice but they have a lawn section where the Green Monstah is supposed to be.
The ballpark is a huge improvement to the city. The local restaurant scene has greatly improved. How did Pawtucket manage to lose such a money-maker? The PawSox have been threatening to leave for years, yet Rhode Island did nothing about it.
I’m only dumping on that little state because I know this bureaucracy will happen here, and the rest of the country isn’t far behind.
I feel I have to say something nice about my little neighbor to the south. Um, Wright’s Chicken Farm is amazingly delicious. Also, the Nordic Lodge has an all-you-can-eat buffet including steak, lobster, and anything else you can think of for only $135 per person. Hint: Don’t eat for three days before and after. You can hide your yacht here to avoid Massachusetts state taxes like John Kerry does. That’s all I can come up with.
What does this say about our society when nobody wants to build a bridge at any cost? I miss the days when projects were double and triple what they should have been. At least they got done. Now we are going nowhere.
Published in Domestic Policy
Hmm that’s odd. Seems like I read that it was being built, and they were just up to the Canada border or something when FJB pulled the plug.
In 2015 when I visited my birthplace home in North Dakota for the first time in decades, trains on the old railroad track that ran along the base of the Missouri Escarpment were hauling a lot of oil from the Bakken fields. I later wished I had taken a photo, to go with all the other photos I had taken. It could have made a pretty photo against the background of the escarpment. I was back in 2016 or 2017, I disremember which, and in 2018. Those trains were almost gone the first time, as more oil was now being hauled by pipeline, and I wasn’t lucky enough to see one and get a photo. In 2018 that rail traffic was almost completely gone. There was no chance to get a photo.
I never did go to the trouble of learning the whole pipeline story to my satisfaction, though.
In 2018 I visited some places from my childhood that are in the oil production area. It wasn’t the mess that some detractors had led me to expect, though it certainly hadn’t improved the looks of the country. The development phase was over in those areas by then.
I’ve since learned more about what an area looks like when an oil field is being developed, when bicycling in the Karnes oil field southeast of San Antonio, especially near Panna Maria. There were times when it was best to simply avoid riding there, even though I found the truck drivers in the oil field to be very polite and accommodating to bicyclers like me. The roads I wanted to ride were all more ridable last time I was there, in 2022.
Part of the problem, at least when it comes to oil, is likely that Warren Buffet owns railroads, not pipelines.
Last time I looked at the war of statistics, I learned some things. The pipeline people talk about fewer spills, therefore pipelines are safer. Railroad fans talk about the total volume spilled.
Since usage began in 1977 the Alaska Pipeline has lost a total of just under 10,000 barrels of oil. The pipeline is 800 miles long. From what I’ve read, oil spills from rail cars just in 2013 amounted to almost 36,000 barrels.
The Enbridge spill here in Michigan spilled about 28,000 barrels in the Kalamazoo River. That was in 2010. (My wife was woken by the smell. We live a couple of miles from the river.)
But if you look at the Enbridge web site, there is a lot of gaming of numbers. If you look at the anti-pipeline web sites, there is a lot of gaming of numbers. For example, they report the volume in gallons, which makes the numbers bigger. I had to divide by 42 to come up with the 28,000 barrels.
Theres a reason pretty much every old railroad yard in the country is a superfund site.
The train in the Lac-Megantic rail disaster was hauling Bakken crude that should have been transported by a pipeline that wasn’t built because it was tied up in lawsuits. 47 people were killed because of environmental wackos. They should burn in hell.
For a brief period I worked for a large controls company out of Rochester. I was dispatched to a superfund site in Sidney NY. The EPA came down on this guy in the 80’s I think, that made railroad ties. They said he was spilling a little creosote on the ground. They fined him tens of thousands of dollars. He was so p’d he opened the valves of all the railroad tankers he had of the stuff. He spent the rest of his life in jail. There is an array of wells sucking the stuff up. They only have about 200 years left.
In Pittsburgh, we had a “bridge to no-where” the span was built in the early 60s and the ramps didn’t get completed until the early 80s.
There are freeway ramps in Portland, Oregon, dating back to the late 1950s, that STILL don’t go anywhere. At the time, though, it would have made sense to plan ahead for what they expected to do. I can’t really fault that. Trying to add them later would have cost a lot more, and taken a lot longer.
And the downtown underpass for I-10 in Phoenix, which opened in 1990, was built with a “transit station” that’s never been used.
What a massive waste. I once did the math on the massive waste of money at the Big Dig in Boston. If you took the actual money spent and applied it to the original estimate, you would have been able to build a tunnel from Boston to Nova Scotia.
Well, that part of the project was going to be hollow anyway. But yes, it’s been a waste to not do SOMETHING with it in all this time.
When I was living there, one thing that sometimes popped up in my mind was wondering where the top/surface entrances/exits were supposed to be. And what might have stupidly been allowed to be built on them instead.