I can't count the number of times I raced over that bridge on my drive between Seattle/Everett and Bellingham. It was always nice to take a look at the river. It might be in it's banks, or it might be in flood and an amazing site to behold - especially if it pushed over the levees. Good thing it was apparently fairly low or it would have been a different story for those cars.

America's infrastructure is crumbling. After the huge push of the Eisenhower administration to build up the Interstate highways (but not limited to Interstate highway bridges) American politicians seem reluctant to repair the aging infrastructure. Look at the bridge collapse in Minnesota on I-35 (I live near the Texas end of that major traffic artery), there was a large collapse in Connecticut on I-95. Those are just plucked from memory, I'm sure Joe's list is much longer.

The House of Representatives has the purse-strings. They're in a rut, demanding austerity (which has been shown to not work, and the report that fueled the recent push around the world was shown to be a mistake by it's authors who couldn't read their own Excel spreadsheet). They have now wasted enough time to vote 37 times to "defeat" established law (the Health Care legislation that is far from perfect, but better than what we had). Why discuss financial health of the nation, health care, and bridges in one sentence? Because the GOP politicians in the U.S. House refuse to acknowledge that by putting forward a program to do major bridge replacement the economy would recover to the level of the Clinton administration or beyond. They are blinded by a decrepit political "vision" that can't see beyond their ability to hold onto the offices they were elected to.

Washington is quite a liberal state, the home of the Wobblies, and as much as they'd like to see that work underway, they can only do so much when it comes to funding such a massive program. The federal government is responsible for many of the roads where the work needs to be done.

SRS (native-Washingtonian)