Corpus Christi Gets a New Harbor Bridge --- Eventually

 

When my wife and I took a short vacation down to the Gulf Coast in October, we used part of a day to visit the Texas State Aquarium in the North Beach part of Corpus Christi.  To get there, we had to take the (old) Harbor Bay Bridge that crosses a large industrial canal through which pass tankers going to the main industry of Corpus Christi, which is oil refining.  That bridge was built in 1959, and about twenty years ago, plans began to be made for a new bridge.  As we saw from miles away, the new Harbor Bridge is well under way and may be completed as soon as 2025.

 

The new bridge will be cable-stayed:  two tall pylons will hold sets of cables that slant out and down to connect to the bridge deck.  And I do mean tall.  One of the pylons is complete, and the builders are extending the deck out from it in both directions.  It is by far the tallest structure for hundreds of miles around, and the cantilevered-out parts extend so far that I got a little giddy just looking at the thing.  When it's finished, the bridge will allow much taller ships to pass underneath than the current bridge, and will have a pedestrian walkway and LED lighting.  Its planned cost is some $800 million, but that was before some delays occasioned in 2022 when an outside consultant raised safety concerns.  That halted construction on a part of the bridge for nine months, but the five safety issues were addressed, and construction resumed last April.

 

Later that month, as the Corpus Christi Hooks were playing a baseball game at nearby Whataburger Field (the eponymous fast-food firm's first restaurant was in Corpus Christi), a fire began near the rear of a construction crane on the bridge.  Subsequent videos obtained by news media show a load on the crane falling rapidly to the ground, and flying debris injured one spectator at the ball game.  A battalion chief for the Corpus Christi Fire Department said a cable failure caused enough friction to set grease on a cable reel afire.  An Internet search has not revealed any other major accidents since the bridge project formally began in 2016, but it is possible that some have escaped the news media's attention.

 

Originally scheduled to be completed in 2020, delays and engineering-firm changes have pushed back the anticipated completion date to 2025.  That's only two years from now, and while a good bit has been accomplished, there is still much remaining.

 

While any injuries or fatalities from construction projects are tragic, we have come a long way from the days when it was just an accepted fact that major bridges and tunnels would cost a certain number of human lives. 

 

In 1875, the 4.75-mile Hoosac Tunnel was completed in the hills of Western Massachusetts.  It took twenty years to build, and 135 verified deaths were associated with the project.  One of the worst accidents happened when a candle in the hoist building at the top of a ventilation shaft caught a naphtha-fueled lamp on fire, and the wooden hoist structure burned and collapsed down the shaft, trapping 13 workers at the bottom, who suffocated.  While the hazards were severe enough to inspire a workers' strike in 1865, this failed to stop construction, and the following year saw the highest number of fatalities: fourteen.

 

In 1937, San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge opened after four years of work.  Its safety record was better than the Hoosac Tunnel, and would have been almost perfect except for a scaffolding failure that sent twelve men plunging through the safety net to the bay.  Two survived, and there was one other unrelated fatality, making a total of eleven.  Nineteen men fell into the safety net and survived to form an exclusive group they called the Half Way to Hell Club.

 

This completely unscientific survey of major construction project fatalities and injuries seems to indicate that over time, we as a culture in the U. S. have grown less tolerant of having workers killed on the job.  Credit for this improvement can be parceled out in a number of directions.

 

The contractors and engineers in charge of construction projects deserve a good share of the credit.  They are the ones who determine how the work will be done, and how important safety is compared to the bottom-line goal of getting the job done. 

 

The increased mechanization of construction labor has to be another factor.  One modern construction worker equipped with the proper tools can do the work that required several workers decades or a century ago.  So the simple fact that fewer people are needed to do a given job has made it less likely that people will be injured or killed on the job.

 

Government agencies—federal, state, and local—also deserve some credit.  The Federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) was founded in 1970, and its influence has undoubtedly led to safety improvements, although doing a cost-benefit analysis of OSHA would be a daunting task even for a team of historians and safety analysts. 

 

Labor unions hold safety as a high priority, and while there are probably statistics supporting the contention that unionized workers have better safety records than non-union employees, a lot of non-union workers manage to work safely too. 

 

If the worst accident that happens during the construction of the new harbor bridge in Corpus Christi turns out to be the flying-debris crane mishap, that will be a truly exemplary record for a project that will have taken nearly a decade and cost nearly a billion dollars.  The project still has a long way to go, and it's possible that the most hazardous operations lie in the future:  putting the rest of the cables in place and connecting the deck to finish off the bridge.  But the contractors have enforced safety sufficiently to get this far with no major incidents, and the hope is that this trend will continue.

 

The other question about the bridge is, of course, will it stay put once it's built?  The original engineering firm for the bridge, FIGG, was kicked off the project in 2022 after an independent review.  FIGG, by the way, was involved in the ill-fated Florida International University pedestrian bridge that collapsed in March of 2018.  Recent reports indicate that all the engineering concerns have been adequately addressed, but we won't know for sure until the bridge is finished and has withstood its first hurricane.  Stay tuned.

 

Sources:  I referred to the following sources:  https://www.kiiitv.com/article/news/local/new-video-port-of-cc-cameras-show-initial-fire/503-52b32589-f72c-4653-926b-2160c83fa3fd, https://www.kristv.com/news/local-news/a-crane-fire-seen-from-up-above-and-felt-from-down-below, https://www.tpr.org/news/2022-09-16/construction-on-new-corpus-christi-bridge-halted-as-engineers-say-design-flaws-could-lead-to-collapse, https://www.kiiitv.com/article/news/local/whataburger-field-spectator-hospitalized/, and https://practical.engineering/blog/2022/9/15/what-really-happened-at-the-new-harbor-bridge-project, as well as the Wikipedia articles on the Hoosac Tunnel and the Golden Gate Bridge.

A Modest Proposal to Save California $200 Million

In order to forestall a lot of hate mail, the following blog is written in the tradition of eighteenth-century satirist Jonathan Swift's essay, "A Modest Proposal."  It is not meant to be taken seriously. 

With that out of the way, I have a modest proposal to save the good citizens of California over $200 million.  That is the estimated cost of a suicide-deterrent net project that is going to be installed on the Golden Gate Bridge, according to a recent article in the San Francisco Examiner. 

Opened in 1937, the Golden Gate Bridge is as iconic a symbol of San Francisco as the Eiffel Tower is of Paris.  But shortly after it opened, its builders found that they had constructed what lawyers call an attractive hazard, like an unfenced swimming pool in a neighborhood full of small children.  The 240-foot plunge from the sidewalk of the bridge to the deep waters below began to draw despondent individuals of all kinds, who generally did not survive their high dives.  According to the Examiner, 1,558 people have committed suicide by diving from the bridge, an average of about one person every two or three weeks.  And this is despite intensive efforts of patrolmen specially trained to spot depressed-looking loners who evince an unhealthy-looking interest in the view from the sidewalk. 

So at long last, after numerous engineering proposals and at least one squabble over who should have won the bid, engineers plan to install a wire-rope mesh on the bridge, about 20 feet below the level of the sidewalk and extending 20 feet out on both sides.  The rendering posted online makes it look fairly unobtrusive, but it will inevitably change the appearance of the bridge, sort of like putting fishnet hose on the legs of a beautiful woman.  (Sometimes it helps, but generally it just looks tacky.)  So if you've never seen the bridge in its present netless state, you'd better go look fast, because soon they will put up temporary fences along the sidewalks to keep people from throwing things at the construction workers below.  This last measure is a consequence of sad experience—pedestrians evidently not only can't be trusted to stay on the sidewalk, they can't keep their potential missiles to themselves either.

And now for the modest proposal.  Last June, California enacted an assisted-suicide law.  It is now legal in that state to plan and execute your own death and funeral, and people have already started taking advantage of this law.  We now see the interesting spectacle of Californians on the one hand spending $200 million to stop a few dozen people a year from doing themselves in, and on the other hand, encouraging people who really want to do themselves in to go ahead and do it. 

For $200 million, a lot of people contemplating suicide in California could have an all-expense paid trip from wherever they live to San Francisco.  Those with debilitating diseases could take ambulance rides, and even they might manage to live it up overnight in the garden of nightlife delights for which San Francisco is famous.  Then, with all good-byes said, the person could be assisted out onto the sidewalk and take the time-honored way out that more than 1500 of their fellow citizens have chosen over the years.  And of course, we wouldn't want any ugly fish-net suicide deterrent to get in the way, so there's where you'd save $200 million.

I don't expect anybody to jump at this idea (so to speak), except to say how tacky I am to conflate the people who jump off the Golden Gate Bridge with the people who take advantage of the new assisted-suicide law.  But the point I'm trying to make with my proposal is this:  is suicide okay, or is it wrong?  Or does the answer depend entirely on the convenience of the professionals involved?

It's beginning to look like the latter is the best available answer, at least where California is concerned. 

Take doctors who want to put some of their suffering patients out of their misery, but are worried that someone will find out and charge them with murder.  Solution:  pass an assisted-suicide law that makes it legal.  Now the docs don't have to worry about murder charges. 

Take first responders who, after someone takes their last high dive from the bridge, have the disagreeable task of conducting a search, possibly in bad weather, and fishing out said diver from the drink.  It's expensive, dangerous, and bad publicity besides.  So once the nets are in place, people who are determined to jump will either find another bridge, or if they're really determined, they'll jump down onto the net and, using the exercise-honed athletic skills that many Californians take pride in, they will crawl to the edge of the net and finish the job.  You heard it here first.  Notice the designers don't call it a suicide-prevention device, just a suicide deterrent.  So even $200 million isn't going to reduce the number of suicides from the bridge to zero, and the authorities implicitly admit that.

All satire aside, I think doing something more to keep people from jumping off bridges to their deaths is a good idea.  And maybe the giant stainless-steel nets on either side of the Golden Gate Bridge are the best way to do it, although the price tag gives me pause.  The expenditure of so much money on suicide prevention, on the one hand, and the passage of a law saying that basically it's okay to off yourself, on the other hand, reveals a deep split or inconsistency in attitudes toward suicide in our most populous state. 

This nation's founders allowed for differences in belief on the part of its citizens.  But for most of the history of the United States, there was a general consensus, based upon mostly religious tenets, that suicide, assisted or not, had no redeeming social value and was to be discouraged in law and in engineering (and in medicine, too).  As evinced by the assisted-suicide law in California, this consensus has broken down, at least in that part of the country.  And that's a sad thing, for both those who stand on the sidewalk of a bridge thinking about jumping, and those who lie in a nursing home thinking about hastening their own end. 

Sources:  The San Francisco Examiner website carried the article "Construction to begin on Golden Gate Bridge suicide deterrent system," on Apr. 13, 2017 at http://www.sfexaminer.com/construction-begin-golden-gate-bridge-suicide-deterrent-system/.  A rendering of what the system may look like once installed can be viewed at

http://www.ggbsuicidebarrier.org/images/suicide-deterrent-rendering-looking-north.jpg.