"After the structure fell into the Mississippi River during rush hour Aug. 1, 2007, killing 13 people and injuring 145 more, Minnesota lawmakers set up a compensation fund for victims. As part of that legislation, they nullified a statute of limitations that would have prevented the state from seeking damages. In May, the nation's highest court declined to hear Jacobs' challenge to that law, and the company had little recourse.
State Sen, Ron Latz sponsored the legislation that set up the compensation fund. While the state recovered from Jacobs and another firm less than half of the nearly $37 million paid out in compensation to victims, Latz said it was the right thing to do, not just for the victims and their families but also for Minnesota taxpayers."
Sure, why not? The engineering and construction companies don't have special immunity. Not sure if you can sue the government or individuals in in it. For the i35 bridge case, lets see...
From Wikipedia "URS Corporation [...] settled for $52.4M [...] URS had performed fatigue analysis consulting on the bridge for the Mn/DOT."
and "Jacobs Engineering Group, the successor of Sverdrup & Parcel, the firm that designed the bridge [...] paid $8.9 million in Nov. 2012 to settle the suit"
Not good enough. If some bridge is decades old, I don't think it's fair to expect some firm that is the descendant of whatever firm designed it so long ago to be liable, especially when all the people ever involved in design and building it are probably dead or close to it.
The real fault is with the government, and especially the elected politicians who don't run the government properly and get these things inspected and fixed (and worse, run on platforms of shrinking government). Why aren't they ever personally liable? They should be.
I'm sure limitations on liability is a heavily legislated and litigated area of law. I have no idea about the details, and am thus am not supporting any particular position, merely relaying some info.
I don't think engineers are being prosecuted for criminal negligence in cases like this - rather, the firms have civil liability. As far as holding politicians personally liable, they can be prosecuted if they break the law. Other than that, I envision it would be chaos if individuals could sue politicians for how they do their job.
So you're saying it's unreasonable to expect maintenance continuity over multiple decades from a private company and its employees, but it is resonable to expect the very same thing from a party that's less knowledgeable and less financially invested in the project?
To me that feels lacking, unless the government bodies responsible for infrastructure maintenance get proper resources and time and expertise to do this on a large scale. Can people today really expect to understand how things were built a 100 years ago? (honest question, imagine the same for IT)
It's unreasonable to hold the original engineer responsible for changes after construction that should require review/stamp/signature from another engineer, such as increasing the depth of the pavement on the roadway. If the bridge didn't meet the code at the time it was built, that's one thing. But that's not the case here.
Also, the private engineering firm likely had nothing to do with the maintenance of the bridge after construction -- That's the job of the state DOT and whoever they contract out to.
There's a lot of knowledge and experience in State DOTs, they'll do some bridges in house, some they contract out for. (WA state, states may vary, depends on budgeting conditions and workload.) The older engineers there are generally really smart, and have been doing it for a long time. In stark contrast to the computer industry, experience really does mean something.
Less knowledgeable and less financially interested? The politicians are the ones who make the ultimate decisions about these projects: whether maintenance will be done (by controlling the budget), whether a replacement will be done, etc. They're the MOST invested in the project, and should be held the most accountable. Why should decision-makers get to run away scot-free after their bad decisions wreak havoc?
They may take some of the decisions, but that doesn't make them knowledgeable or financially invested. How would a politician make money from a construction project? The company that engineered it does, sure, but the guy who commissioned it? He benefits from being in office.
> Can people today really expect to understand how things were built a 100 years ago?
Yes. This can be done.
The same as today, 100 years ago designs were based in calculations of the bridge response to the expected loads. Today, we know better what are those loads and how to calculate the response of the structure, but it is the same process.
Construction itself has also changed with the years. We have ways to asset materials and machine them that are way ahead of what we had 100 years ago, we can assembly the bridge with much more precision, and the efficiency of our tools has vastly improved, but the principles are the same.
Hmmmm. You might be right, but I'm just thinking about what I read about difficulties replicating the Saturn V rockets, which obviously were built much later than 100 years ago, under extreme scrutiny of top-of-the-line engineering of their time, and yet, we can't build them again from original blueprints.
The issue seems to be that despite having extremely detailed blueprints a lot of the actual assembly was left to skilled welders and technicians on site, and they used techniques which were not documented. So You can look at the blueprint, you can look at the actual remaining Saturn-V rocket, and still have no idea how two elements were welded together to withstand launching into space, because it's just not documented anywhere. The person who did the weld is long dead, so in a way, an extremely important element of assembly is lost and has to be replicated by experimentation.
I'd imagine it's the same with bridges - blueprints might say that a column of specific durability was used, but it won't say how it was made, and therefore you won't know what can break inside it.
The other factor I read regarding the difficulties of resurrecting the Saturn V engines, was that they used a lot of mechanical feedback control systems to regulate fuel flow etc.
Modern engineers can understand them in theory, but they'd just use a micro-controller for anything that complicated, so they don't have the same fluency in those systems as the original engineers.
The government can be sued. If they loose the suit they (or rather) taxpayers have to pay. So in theory if you vote for politicians and policies that cause these kinds of failures you the voter are held liable.
Maybe we should have a system where we no longer have secret ballots, and instead your votes are recorded, but in an encrypted way so that only a proper impartial investigation board (perhaps at the federal level) can have access to it, in cases where it's decided that the voters for bad politicians need to be punished personally for their contribution to the problem. So when the government is sued, everyone who voted for those politicians gets to pay. I really don't see why those who voted against the negligent or criminal politician should be on the hook for it.
If you vote against them you're held liable, too. It would be wonderful if I could pick what portion of expenditures the government is allowed to use my individual taxes for though.
If government-owned infrastructure falls down (because of lack of funding) and injures or damages, is anyone liable?
Not a rhetorical question