Obama Caught ‘Over-Suggesting’ Risk of North Carolina Bridge Collapses
“Over-suggesting.” That’s how the North Carolina newspaper that looked into the president’s latest dishonest scaremonger actually puts it. Would a Republican get a similarly charitable reaction when caught out trying to terrify people into supporting a bill?
President Barack Obama scared some of us last week when he stopped in Raleigh to pitch his American Jobs Act.
He told an audience at N.C. State University that the nation should beef up spending to repair bad bridges – before one of them falls on us.
“In North Carolina alone, there are 153 structurally deficient bridges that need to be repaired,” Obama said Wednesday. “Four of them are near here, on or around the Beltline. Why would we wait to act until another bridge falls?”
Terry Duff called The News & Observer to ask where these dangerous bridges are, so his family can avoid them. Other readers wondered whether there really was cause for alarm.
“Was this merely political hokum used in an attempt to push his new jobs bill or is it a fact?” Edward G. O’Connor wrote in a letter published Friday in The N&O’s People’s Forum.
DOT engineers and administrators are fielding calls about the president’s remarks, too. They say the bridges around the Beltline and across the state are safe.
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Obama appears to have undercounted his bridges. And at the same time – employing the deft spin that political speakers use when they spice up a little information to make a big impression – the president may have over-suggested the risk to public safety.
Under federal guidelines, DOT inspectors examine each of North Carolina’s 17,000 bridges at least once every two years. It turns out about 2,700 bridges – not 153 – are rated below federal standards as “structurally deficient.” Seven of them are on Raleigh’s Beltline.
But–
The Federal Highway Administration applies that scary-sounding label to thousands of bridges across the nation. It basically means the bridge needs careful maintenance and repair to stay in service, and eventually it will have to be rehabilitated or replaced – or closed.
“Structurally deficient doesn’t necessarily mean that they are dangerous,” said Tom Crosby, spokesman for the Charlotte-based AAA Carolinas motor club, which lobbies for more money to replace old bridges. “If these bridges were dangerous, they would close them down and immediately begin work on them.”
Each bridge is graded with a sufficiency rating that gives a 55 percent weight to its structural condition. The score, on a 1-to-100 scale, also includes factors unrelated to safety or structural quality.
One reason the Bonner Bridge over Oregon Inlet has a low rating of 4 is that there is no convenient detour option. DOT awarded a $216 million contract this summer to replace the deteriorating bridge, and it will spend millions more on maintenance before the new one is ready in 2015.
DOT’s bridge inspection reports are public records. The agency publishes lists of bridge ratings and other information online at ncdot.gov/projects/ncbridges.
Late Monday, a White House aide said Obama’s numbers had come from statistics – which appeared to be incomplete – on deficient federal highways in North Carolina. And if Obama’s numbers were squishy, DOT’s information was marred by omissions and errors, too.
>So, the president shouldn’t be running around using squishy statistics to terrify people and push his “shovel ready” pile of spending demands.
It’s crappy journalism like that which causes today’s newspapers to be “under- read”.
In 2012, Obama will be “under-voted”.
Seriously, does this guy have no sense at all of the importance of his office, the responsibilities he has? The President, of all people, should not be the one crying, “Wolf!” Did he think the people would not get alarmed for their safety? Would they not want to know exactly which bridges were unsafe?
Of course, part of the problem is the government using the term “deficient”. I do not think that word means what they think it means.
adjective 1. lacking some element or characteristic; defective: 2. insufficient; inadequate.
When you apply that term to a bridge, people think, “inadequate, defective”, thus unsafe.
Yeah, I get that this is a more technical usage of the word, co-opted for a purpose, maybe for a lack of a better term. Perhaps that was explained to Obama, and perhaps he accepted it. But as a politician, he should have realized how he first understood when he heard it, and thus realized how others would hear it and react.
Or maybe, once again, he was just reading the speech put forward by his juvenile speech-writers, and he simply had no clue, being unable to empathize with anyone else.
Lack of empathy. Sociopath.
NC would not be in such deep doo-doo if they could share that $535 millions Solyndra money. Even if the bridge construction company folded after rebuilding that falling apart bridge, poor NC residents would have a newly repaired bridge to gaze upon. Now only billionaire McDuck Kaiser has a few more milliions to count in his counting house stuffed with billions tax deducted money.
I hope this administration doesn’t pull another ‘Fast and Furious’. Bridges will mysteriously not receive their normal maintenance in hopes that they will fail so Obama can say see we need to pass the bill.
Who is ultimately responsible for DOT’s squishy statistics? Certainly not the president, who is only responsible for making speeches, except for insuring their accuracy.
Maybe the DOT needs a czar to make sure little lenin isn’t embarrassed again.
Oh wait, he is impossible to embarrass.
The states are supposed to maintain the bridges. And they do. And btw, the electric utilities are supposed to maintain the “grid”. And they generally do, too. The federal government has no role to play, aside from possibly maintaining standards.
Be sure not to miss the ongoing saga of “Obama & the Scary Bridges,” the show he’s taking on the road just in time for Halloween.
Today’s episode featured Obama decrying the Brent Spence bridge, which spans the Ohio River and connects Cincinnati (Boehner’s stomping grounds) to Kentucky (Mitch McConnell’s home state). Pure coincidence, I’m sure.
Check your local listings to see when Scary Bridges will appear in your viewing area.
Another item for my PC decoder ring, Dem “over suggesting” = Rep “liar”. Do all newspapers run their stories through a media bias translator so they grade all the Dems on a curve, or just this administration?
When architects talk about a building having a “structural failure,” it doesn’t mean the building is likely to collapse. An example of a structural failure is a certain portion of a floor vibrating when people walk over it. That just means the engineers didn’t use the correct numbers for the material and the load it must bear (or, that the contractor substituted cheaper materials for the specified ones).
Bridges are typically built with a 3x safety factor, meaning that they are built to bear three times the anticipated load.
If you just keep in mind that everything that comes out of Obeyme’s mouth is for the purpose of manipulation, it will all make sense.
– “guvner”. Shame if something happened to it…