Connecticut bridge collapse

Well, my short but impassioned appeal a couple of weeks ago to the authorities at Wimbledon to try fair but drastic measures in the treatment of juvenile delinquency on the tennis courts doesn't seem to have done much good.

You may remember I quoted the memorable prescription of the late Red Smith, the most artful, racy and graceful sports writer in the language, of any, at least, that I've read or known. Red had total recall of the facts, the moods, the characters of many sports. He was a witty man but also a kind one and exercised a discipline on his wit that must be unique among clever writers. He was never clever at the expense of decent people, however wrong, or of simple people who could not answer back. The only people who moved him to anger were bullies, show-offs and boors.

So it was, I think, two years ago, in one of the last tennis columns he wrote that he exploded at the spoiled-brat tantrums that were degrading the game and making the old word 'sportsmanship' not only an anachronism but an absurdity. He ended, you recall, by saying that if the officials would stop tiptoeing through a series of cautions and warnings and tiny fines which hurt rather less than a slap on the wrist and would, instead, at the first obscene abuse of an umpire fire one of these riff-raff not from the match, but the tournament they would dispose, at a stroke, of the whole slum-clearance project.

It's pretty clear from the headlines and the juicy newspaper coverage that tantrums sell newspapers, as well as tickets. Maybe my old sports writer friend, the New Yorker's Herbert Warren Wind is right. 'It's too late,' he says, 'to stop it now. The money tour is too big, some of the worst offenders also play the best tennis. It could have been stopped in, say, 1980.' Mr Wind shakes his head and packs his bags for Britain and the Golf Championship where, he says, he can get the taste of tennis out of his mouth.

Well, to other matters. Early in the morning, last Tuesday, luckily very early, a truck and a dribble of cars were moving along part of a six-lane Connecticut motorway that becomes a bridge over a river. A man whose home is on the river bank said he looked out the window and 'I saw a truck and a car coming off the bridge and going into the water. Then I heard people moaning.' Without any warning, a hundred-foot section of the bridge had collapsed. 'Without any warning' is perhaps a little glib. People who live nearby say that for the past four or five years, bits of concrete and steel and short links of girders have been falling off the bridge and that lately, in the past week or so, the neighbours have heard a high, piercing sound accompanying the rumble of traffic over the bridge. Several of them complained in writing to the state's transportation department and, as long ago as March, a repair crew came and took a look at the bridge but never came back.

It may be that this is a case of negligence and certainly the collapse of a bridge is a rarity, but it has received enormous and scary coverage in the press because it has dramatically underlined a condition of decay in the underpinnings, what we now call the infrastructure, of the cities. It must be, I think, three or four years ago, since I took notice in a talk of a study of what you might call the maintenance grid of New York City. All the structures you do not see that brace the life of the city – the water pipes, the sewage system, the electrical wiring of buildings – we've all known that the streets and the highways of the city have had a terrible time especially after hard winters followed by blazing summers. This sequence bursts the seams in the paving and the repair of potholes in the spring is almost a folk custom.

That has always been so, but what this study showed was that New York was now beginning to pay for having been a pioneer in the first years of the century in laying down the grid of a modern city. What's happening here is becoming true of other, old cities that 70, 80 years ago electrified themselves, installed water purifying systems, put in such sturdy materials as copper and iron as the underground support for the life and industry above ground.

The materials, the pipes, the wiring, the vats are rotting. Not least, the stanchions of bridges. A federal study has been done on the bridges which reminds us that the first people, the French, who really roamed the eastern half of this country called it 'the land of a thousand rivers' and that's not a poetic licence. A thousand is a conservative estimate. Anyway, there are over half a million bridges, sizeable bridges in this country. The study frankly declares that 20 per cent of them are obsolete, the materials were put together in the eighteenth or nineteenth century and have been repaired and repaired to the point where the originals will have to be replaced. But another 25 per cent – and this reflects a chronic problem that many more countries are going to have to face – another 25 per cent of the biggest bridges cannot handle for much longer the weight, the actual weight, of traffic that's allowed on the approach roads.

In all, a quarter of a million American bridges are in need of repair and it's calculated that this job could take about 20 years and this in a country where I think it can be fairly said building crews and repair crews go about their business with surprising industry and speed. The federal study concludes that the present estimate for repairing those quarter million bridges is about $47 billion. Certainly, you can bet that if a vast national effort were undertaken now, the cost overruns at the end of 20 years would boggle the mind and the Treasury.

Plainly it's not a subject that the President of the United States cares to brood on just before he gets into bed. With a national budget deficit running at over $200 billion and everybody from bankers and allies and congressmen warning of the direst fate for the economy if the deficit is not brought down drastically, the last prospect you'd want to face is a federal job that would add another $47 billions to the deficit. Of course it would also add, maybe, a million or two long-running jobs.

What, however, is deeply depressing about this discovery of decay in our underpinnings, especially of roads and bridges, is the thought that since the Second World War there has been a radical change in the means by which goods are taken from one place to another – from the railroads to the highways. The power of the Teamsters, the national transport union which recruits the truckers is so overwhelming that frequent investigations of corruption in its management, reputed links with the Mafia, enormous salaries for its highest officials, all these things come to be discounted because, while once it was a railway strike that can cause panic and the fetching out of the National Guard, today we simply have to bow to the Teamsters more than anybody.

A strike of the truckers who thunder across and up and down the continent could paralyse the movement of goods and the economy. It makes one feel wistful for the old days – the old days being any day before the Second World War when the New Yorker, for example, carried cartoons about the importance of freight loadings. Before Detroit became the hub of the automobile industry, the first item that investors and such looked for on the financial pages was the weekly report on the volume of freight loadings. I remember one cartoon of a bald tycoon nuzzling in a banquette with his bit of fluff and he's saying, 'I see that freight loadings have hit an annual high. I think, dear, we can safely break out the champagne!'

Today, the states governments and the Teamsters always have a bone to pick. Several states have set limits in the weight of cargoes that trucks can carry on certain highways. Of course, every state that's involved in what is called 'interstate commerce' has toll stations where trucks are weighed and pay a graduated tax. This opens up a pretty opportunity for collusion and corruption between the toll keepers and the truckers.

There are bills before Congress to limit the passage of the biggest trucks on all federal highways that have bridges along the way. Failing such an improbable national measure, some states are imposing fines, along with a warning, but these are clearly, to use, in the light of the Connecticut accident, a grizzly word 'stopgap' measures, sooner than later, the president and the Congress are going to have to face the root of the matter. The repair and maintenance of a quarter of a million bridges and heaven knows how many thousand city underpinnings which were once the pride of modern industrial skill and are now the rotting relics of the industrial revolution.

The other topic that for ten days or more monopolised the front pages was the Pope's visit to Poland and the nature and timing of the agreement, if any, between the Pope and the Polish government. It came as an immense shock to, I guess, most Americans to hear that the Pope had made a deal with General Jaruzelski to guarantee the Vatican's opposition to any popular uprising in return for an end to martial law.

Now that's putting it about as strongly as we dare and it may not be true. We do know that the deputy editor of the Vatican newspaper who wrote that Mr Walesa was an uncomfortable person who had lost his battle was asked to resign.

The most influential of Washington columnists wrote, 'For one glorious week, the world thought that the Polish Communists had made a terrible mistake in permitting the Polish people to greet the Pope. The Vatican will have to do more than fire an editor to dispel the impression that, at the end, it was the Pope who made the mistake. If this judgement is coarse and wrong, it becomes the duty of the press to find out and of the Vatican to publish the subtler alternative truth.'

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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