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
Government regulations. Not all bad, but the paperwork process that happens before you see anything takes a long time
how many people died during construction of the hoover dam?
Lot of reviews like CEQA, community inputs, feedback, environmental review. On top of that using consultants. In many countries things like subways, HSR are built with in-house people
Well, 50+ years ago they also started building the Francis Scott Key bridge, and that took around 9 years from initial funding to actually opening the bridge (and not counting a lot of the planning that went into it earlier in the 60s).
So we know 50 years ago they wouldn’t have done it faster because they *didn’t* build it faster. Different kinds of projects have different timelines of course, and if you’re willing to throw tons of money to getting it done quickly and/or disregard safety and environmental considerations, you can certainly build things faster.
That being said, from what I’ve seen the 10 year “estimate” isn’t really an actual estimate. My understanding is that was basically a quote lamenting the fact that some public works projects do take a long time now, and wasn’t specific to the rebuilding of the bridge. I doubt it takes that long, but it’s early yet to have very specific timelines. There’s a lot they could do to upgrade the new bridge, and, depending on what it is, that could add time to the rebuild. A lot of what takes a while with big projects though is regulatory and has to do with the land acquisition. But the government already owns the land, and regulatory bodies can be made to move faster on projects like this, particularly when we already did a lot of the legwork for the original bridge.
You can build anything extremely quickly if you don’t care about the safety of the builders or the quality of the materials. Now add in a busy sea way/port, a collapsed bridge and who knows what else. These all add time. I very much doubt it’ll take 10 years as the Key bridge seems fairly important.
On the Empire State Building: *Construction works began before the design was completed. Foundations were excavated while demolition of the existing building was still going on. The official death toll was 14 workers.*
The Hoover Dam: Was designed before the construction started. Was built on dry land … they diverted the river around the dam site and had a dedicated rail line delivering concrete. Official death toll was 96 workers.
The short simple version: red tape. Every construction requires bidding processes, piles of permits, environmental studies, input periods from the community, etc. 100 yrs ago, someone could buy land, and have the permits in short order due to less requirements (and an easier time greasing palms). Now between real learned needs (such as the long-term environmental impact studies) and artificially needed reasons (I won’t list any to keep this neutral), you will have constant process stops and waits both for those permits and studies and while local/higher governments get involved to put their stamp on something. This is a great video, btw: https://youtu.be/dOe_6vuaR_s?si=Asxbv7ZlfYE1bOc6
Much stricter building and safety codes. Everything take longer, requires more inspection and costs many times more. I’m not saying safety isn’t important, only that you’ll always have to trade off one thing for another.
Regulations. Safety, engineer, building codes, environmental impact, all these things take TIME and a lot of it. We just didn’t care that we were fucking up people or the environment in the past. Environmental impact shouldn’t be too big of a study for this bridge since it was already there before, BUT they’ll still need an environmental impact study for the building process. Engineering is a lot less “wild-west” than the past now too, so that takes time as well.
Safety. When they were building the Empire State Building, unemployed people would gather underneath waiting for someone to fall off. Then they would scramble to the foreman and the position would be filled before the poor guy even hit the ground.
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