A container ship hitting a pillar.
It doesn’t take much for one of the most important and most used bridges in the United States to collapse like a house of cards.
Which brings us to today’s quiz question: why weren’t the bridge piers protected?
Quite simply because no one had thought that such a large ship could ram straight into the pillars.
Photo AFP
It’s as stupid as that.
It’s like the World Trade Center towers. Who could have predicted that one day they would be hit head-on by passenger planes?
It was beyond our imagination.
But it happened.
And when it happened, people found it so mind-blowing, so incredible that they said to themselves that it wasn’t possible.
Bad people had probably placed explosive charges in strategic locations in the twin towers.
A structure of this magnitude doesn’t collapse like that, let’s see!
Well yes.
It crashes like that.
Just hit the right place.
- Listen to the Martineau – Dutrizac meeting between Benoît Dutrizac and Richard Martineau via QUB :
The worst is possible
This is why Michael Bay’s disaster films (Armageddonthe series of transformers) and Roland Emmerich (Independance Day, The Day After Tomorrow, 2012) are so popular with the general public, despite the poverty of their storyline.
Because there is something astounding, astonishing in watching infrastructures and monuments that we thought were indestructible explode, implode, crash.
We don’t believe it.
The White House exploding.
The Statue of Liberty under the ice.
The Eiffel Tower falling apart.
Mount Rushmore pulverized.
We believe we are invincible, immortal, imperishable, then we realize that we are fragile.
Would you have imagined that angry activists would storm the Capitol under the encouragement of the president?
It was not only never seen before, it was never imagined.
But it happened. Live. In front of cameras around the world.
The world’s largest democracy threatened by a coup attempt.
The most powerful country on the planet on the brink of civil war.
We saw it with our own eyes.
Remember the ice storm.
Montreal was on the verge of running out of water!
We came close to disaster!
Who knew our metropolis was so vulnerable?
Now imagine what would happen if terrorists hit a dam, a water treatment plant, a nuclear power plant.
It’s not just possible. It’s possible.
Worse: probable.
Nothing is forever
We say to ourselves: a bridge that collapses like that, in a few seconds, could happen in a banana republic in South America or Africa, yes, but not in the United States!
In the United States, the infrastructure is solid! Democratic institutions too!
Well no.
Our giants who we believe to be immortal have feet of clay.
A bridge collapses. A civilization too.
You just need to know where – and how hard – to strike.
The foundations of our civilization, the ideological foundations on which our societies rest, are as fragile and vulnerable as the pillars of a bridge.
It’s not just our infrastructure that is aging and crumbling.
Our values too.