It took a year to build the Empire State Building, and 5 years to build the Hoover Dam yet current estimates for the Francis Scott Key bridge rebuild are near 10 years. Why is this? Have we regressed?
In: Engineering
Besides the other factors mentioned here (safety and environmental considerations being the largest), both the Empire State Building and the Hoover Dam were built in the middle of the Great Depression, so there was an essentially unlimited supply of (cheap) labor for the projects. Today most construction companies can barely find enough people to put together large enough crews for highway maintenance projects. The FSK bridge was having potholes repaired at 130am by a small crew of immigrant workers from Mexico and Guatemala when it collapsed.
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