Brief talk the BND article and a short addenum from last post

On Wednesday, the Belleville News-Democrat published an article on deficient bridges in the Metro-East. Their article went after mostly smaller, minor bridges, as the majority of the deficient bridges are. (Note: their link is only good for a few days after the article.)

I held off on writing this post for a day, waiting to see if the Alton Telegraph would do such a thing in the River Bend. Well, that hasn't come, so I'm not waiting any longer.

This article is bringing me back memories of the infamous night of August 10, 1994. I was watching KSDK News at 10 that fateful night when the anchor broke the shocking news. Plenty of words that I can't mentioned here were said in that house at the moment, and those nasty words were likely repeated in many households in the Metro East. There was little mentioned by the anchor but her voice that night sounded like this was bad.

Rush hour the ensuing two mornings was some of the most f'ed up traffic jams the Metro-East has ever seen. Two broken pins at an expansion joint put the COR Bridge out of commission for westbound traffic, and if you wanted to cross the river you were going to be sitting in traffic for a long time. Things would return to normal by Sunday but IDOT wasn't done screwing with our minds. The following Friday, right there in afternoon rush hour, they shut down two lanes for emergency inspections and more repairs. This got intense local media coverage, and had the social media networking been around back then, it would been obvious that IDOT would receive some major heat.

Meanwhile on the safety standpoint, the weather is getting warmer and this means more motorcycles will be out. Be especially careful for the stunt bikers, they are known to take it to the local highways during off-peak and weekend daytime hours. These bikers will do dangerous stunts right on the highway and have a potential to cause issues.

Fast forward to the 3 minute mark of this video and watch it until the 7 minute mark. This video is very self explanatory and there is several bikers doing dangerous stunts, including stuff right on the bridge. There is at least two other known ROC 2010 videos on YouTube that been filmed on the bridge that I know of. Please stay alert on these nice days for large groups of motorcycles, and if you encounter stuntmen, please give them the right of way.