February 1, 2013 - 8:25 am
An elevated portion of highway in central China collapsed on Friday after a truck loaded with fireworks for Lunar New Year celebrations exploded, killing at least nine people and sending vehicles plummeting about 100 feet to the ground.
Earlier reports indicated almost 30 people were killed, although China is now admitting to only nine. A 260-foot stretch of the highway collapsed in the explosion.
Thomas Friedman et al., marvel at how modern China is. Well, of course — hardly anything there is more than 25 years old, other than some Imperial relics and the rice paddies. But look beneath the veneer and Beijing’s ability to “get things done,” and you see an awful lot of people dying of shoddy workmanship.
Even their freeways are shoddy knock-offs.
Accidents happen. Remember the collapse of I-95 in Connecticut in the 1980s. Then it was a ‘pin’ failure that caused the bridge to give way and fall into the Mianus River, taking two trucks down, along with some passenger cars. That bridge couldn’t have been more than thirty years old.
The I-95 collapse happened during the night, otherwise the death toll might have been far higher than it was. No indication of when the Chinese explosion took place?
The economic illusion and slave labor just has to hold up long enough to capture the U.S. through D.C., as they began several administrations ago. This new America and new economy is looking more and more like a shoddy knock-off of old America and the old market economy, isn’t it?
There’s a very specific reason we get that eerie feeling.
China and lot of other nations are rife with officials skimming off the top. The result is shoddy construction like this, buildings that fall down, etc. Just wait before long when the Chinese dams, including the Three Gorges, start to collapse.
The Chinese have a name for it that translates to “Tofu Construction.”
They’ve noticed the building inhabited by the “elite” hold up to earthquakes a lot better than public school houses. It is reported that the first cases of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder for the Chinese Army happened when troops where digging the bodies of children out building collapsed by an earth quake.
Of course because of money blown on railways to nowhere and mass transit schemes, maintenance on US bridges, roads, and such is falling behind.
Welcome to Tofu USA.