by Travis Mateer
If you tried to travel this past week, you may have encountered a special realm of transportation hell that decimated the Christmas spirit, leaving chaos and rage in the wake of THOUSANDS of flight cancellations. Even Martin “Gomer” Kidston’s Missoula Current had to acknowledge the shit-show as Alaska Airlines produced similar results for its paying customers in the Pacific Northwest.
While weather was certainly a factor, it was by no means the ONLY factor, which is why Pete Buttigieg was assuring Americans on a late late show appearance that flying experiences would get better. From the link:
Southwest Airlines stranding thousands of Americans during the holiday season is not some unexpected crisis nor the normal consequence of inclement weather — and federal officials are not powerless bystanders. Before the debacle, attorneys general from both parties were sounding alarms about regulators’ lax oversight of the airline industry, imploring them and congressional lawmakers to crack down.
The warnings came just before Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg appeared on national television insisting travel would improve by the holidays, and before Southwest executives — flush with cash from a government bailout — announced new dividend payouts to shareholders, while paying themselves millions of dollars.
If this abysmal airline performance doesn’t get your blood boiling, remember that electrified bridge I wrote about a week ago? Well, the Missoulian has an even MORE in depth article about how the $47,000 dollar fix from the Missoula Redevelopment Agency (which got approved, by the way) is actually ON TOP OF a previous chunk of $30,000 dollars, which did NOT fix the problem.
And what’s the problem? Before getting to the hilarious technical explanation, let me explain what I think the REAL problem is: an unelected, unaccountable bureaucrat by the name of Ellen Buchanan who spent $4.7 million dollars of PUBLIC money so Missoula could have America’s FIRST heated pedestrian bridge.
First, the technical explanation (emphasis mine):
“Over the last two winters, the bridge steel superstructure became energized through an electrical leak, and out of an abundance of caution, (the city’s parks and recreation department) has not operated the bridge deck heating system,” explained Tod Gass, a project manager with the MRA. “The source of the electrical leakage was unknown until recently when Jackson Contractor Group, the bridge construction contractor, and Jacobson Electric identified the source of the leakage and presented a solution to Parks.”
The proposed remedy, which is to install ground fault circuit interruption protection to the deck heating electrical system, is a requirement of the National Electric Code for fixed outdoor electric and snowmelting equipment.
“Somehow, through the complex chain of contractor/subcontractor/supplier designs and shop-drawing submittals to the city, this requirement was omitted in shop-drawing reviews and was not picked up on and so it wasn’t enforced during electrical inspection,” Gass explained. “Since the installation of GFCI protection would have been included in the cost of the MRA construction contract as a code requirement, (MRA staff) believes it is appropriate to incur that expense now in order to meet code and alleviate a potential public safety issue.”
While this jargon-rich pile of bullshit is fun and all, my favorite part is how Missoula was one of the first ones out of the gate to spend PUBLIC money on a bridge like this, and how THAT is used as some kind of excuse for this now $76,000 thousand dollar fuckup (emphasis mine):
Crews from Jackson Contractor Group built the bridge using a heated, fiber-reinforced polymer material. There are heated coils in the bridge that are supposed to prevent ice and snow from building up over the winter months, and a drainage system keeps the water off. It was one of the first heated FRP bridges in the country when it was built.
However, in 2020, the MRA’s board approved spending $30,000 on a different fix for the heating system, because it was malfunctioning in very cold weather.
“Being the first of its kind, the city and MRA have worked out some bugs in the operation of the heated deck,” Gass explained.
This Gass guy is a real laugh because he wants us to think it’s the innovation’s fault, and not the humans who decided to BUY the design innovation in the first place. But I assure you, dear readers, the problem is definitely the humans, both the public and private ones, who keep dancing this dance of dysfunction with other people’s money.
I hope this last chunk of public money is the last we hear about Missoula’s most expensive pedestrian bridge. As for the airlines, I’m sure FEDERAL Democrats will do so much better than our local ones on overseeing critical transportation infrastructure.
If you’d like to support my upcoming trip to Helena to keep an eye on public money addicts, like those shifty train junkies, then please consider making a donation at my about page.
Thanks for reading!