Wow! That seems scary!
Why did I decide to blog on it? Because "scary headlines" are what are pushed at us all the time, and they tend to have a political agenda, even if there may be neither anything political nor scary involved.
If you read the whole article, you find:
But despite the rankings, officials say drivers should not be worried.I'm sure that headline will show up on a lot of papers in Iowa, and get a lot of political attacks on Republican officials. Why are we so divided again? While the article is "true", I wanted to look at a little context, often missing in todays "headline news". The end of the article does give a hint ...
“If there’s any concern about safety and the traveling public, they will either post a bridge for load, which means they’ll restrict the weight, or maybe truck traffic that crosses the bridge or in extreme cases, they may shut down a lane or the entire bridge,” ARTBA Chief Economist Alison Black said.
Officials say many cities may struggle to raise the money for necessary repairs, especially in rural areas.
Officials say many cities may struggle to raise the money for necessary repairs, especially in rural areas.
Iowa is blessed with a LOT of rural roads! Most people will read just the headline, and it will likely be endlessly repeated on social media.
Why would Iowa have so many bridges?
At least in NW Iowa there are mostly quite small bridges over the many tile drainage ditches. From my not super extensive travels around Iowa, this seems to be true for much of the state. A glance at this chart of where the defective bridges are at, shows that many of those states are in areas where there tend to be significant parts of the year that alternate between freezing and thawing, which means more salt as well as just the effects of the temperature changes.
Minnesota and Wisconsin are an interesting challenge to my theory. Having traveled extensively in both states (grew up in WI, lived in MN for 40 years), one thought is that once they freeze, they tend to mostly stay frozen ... the frost doesn't tend to partially come out during the winter.
Iowa has a lot more truck traffic than either MN or WI in rural areas.The above chart shows that neither makes the top 13 for number of bridges.
Small dairy farms are pretty much replaced by multi-thousand cow herds, while in IA, the 23 million hogs are housed in 5,400 separate farms that need tending with big trucks. Why so many farms vs concentration? Needing to knife in 10 billion gallons of hog manure demands a lot of dispersion, meaning a lot of 120,000 lb tank/tractor combinations running over mostly side roads with all those small bridges over tile drainage ditches.
I don't really want to ramble on about the MN/WI rating possibly disproving my theory. Maybe they just really do have much better government, and Iowa is derelict. The main point is that the article doesn't really go to enough depth to tell much of anything beyond a ranking that causes attention to be focused.
A lot of US infrastructure is in bad shape ... roads, bridges. canals. electrical grid, etc. About what one would expect in a rapidly failing nation, more focused on which bathroom to use rather than mundane things like infrastructure.
Perhaps articles like this can "hide the decline", or at least divert attention from the federal government to red state governments.
As I've often seen in Democrat writings in IA, the simple solution is to get rid of the hog farms! (while they enjoy their bacon. sausage on pizza, ribs, etc. Deep thought is often not a Democrat characteristic!
I'm REALLY biased. I LOVE my pork and one year I worked for my brother in law as the team of 3 tank/tractor units running 24X7 pumped and knifed in a tiny fraction of the hog manure. A mere 50 million gallons.
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