The Bay Bridge is a Failure?

“The weakened component, known as an eyebar, was part of a network of eight similar pieces. When the piece failed, the stress was redistributed to the other strands. Bridge officials would not say whether the problem would have ultimately led to bridge failure had it gone undetected. Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/09/06/BALL19J81O.DTL#ixzz0QJWIWTPH

Incidentally, the bridge is doing quite well - there has been some unprecedented progress in its reconstruction - but a piece of the language in this article isn’t. I’d like to talk, for a moment, about a phrase I picked up in this quote, from an article in the SF Chronicle yesterday, regarding a ‘crack’ that was discovered this weekend in a piece of the Bay Bridge. Can you see the phrase? It’s a little one, and pretty innocuous at first glance. That’s right…‘bridge failure.’

I happen to live in San Francisco and am something of a bridge enthusiast (okay, not actually an enthusiast, but, camon, is there anything cooler then imagining a real, live bridge enthusiast? Like some round-face guy who collects little model bridges, and subscribes to Bridge Weekly, and giggles stupidly whenever anyone asks him to play cards cause he gets to wink like Santa Clause all coyley and reply, “well, only if it’s Bridge!” I picture some guy from Brooklyn whose flown out here just to admire the Golden Gate, and how breathless he gets over the first sight of it. ”Jeesus, Mac, would you look at that fuckin’ thing…now that’s a goddam bridge. Look at the lines, the fuggin’ girders, Mac. She’s a beaut, Mac, I’m tellin’ ya, Straight-A Class on this one here. A bridge this amazing, totally wasted on these pansies.”) Anyway, as I said what they’re talking about in this quote, had led to this phrase, ‘Bridge Failure.’ Let’s have a closer look:

‘Bridge failure’ as a phrase, is really, logically, perfect in it’s simplicity. A bridge’s job, is to bridge, one area to another, to allow transport from one area to another, typically over something (I’ll allow here for abstract bridges like, say, a bridge to the future. I will not, however, allow such farces as a stairway to heaven, which is, to my knowledge, impossible, even in the abstract sense.) Failure of such an object would be, despite its intended purpose, that it has subsequently not bridged two things. And we can’t kid ourselves that this term is every used hypothetically for bridges yet built, as though engineers are using this, pleasantly, in the planning phase. “Yes, Tom, you’re numbers add up here, I see that, but I think it has still not got enough Maumsberg Units on this side, and that’s classic Bridge Failure, Tom, don’t you see.” So, ‘Bridge failure,’ though not necessarily, in the truest sense of the word, really can’t help but imply that a bridge already exists, and that it’s that bridge which has failed.

And engineers, ‘officials’, or whatever, using this term, well…it’s a bullshit term. The trouble with it is that unlike most euphemisms which are effective because they muddy, muddle, or otherwise muck up the true, simple nature of something, ‘bridge failure’ is, by turn, too simple. It’s like calling the Hindenburg a blimp-failure. Just imagine a bridge, this goddam monument of steel, concrete and precarious heights, collapsing into the sea. Maybe, maybe! we might use ‘bridge failure’ in some history class like a dozen years later but, at the time, in news reports even, the only phrase which would accurately describe the failure of the bridge would be, “AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGHHHHHHH THE HUMANITY! Oh my holy god! So much concrete, nooooooooooooo!”

Then again, maybe I’m being too harsh. This phrase is from the same article which referenced the weight of a replacement piece of bridge as ”the weight of 16 Statues of Liberty.” As though this has any goddam meaningful measure to the human mind. “sixteen of them, huh? Well, the Statue of Liberty, which recall is three football fields in length, and uses as much steel as four battleships…hmm, three times four, times sixteen….and a battleship weighs at least three hundred mini-coopers. That’s 57,600 mini-coopers. Which, incidentally, is about a fourth of the average number of cars which will travel over the very bridge, incidentally. It’s all very confusing, and I haven’t quite worked out all of the numbers.