Mistakes Are Not Excuses. That's True with Building Bridges or Driving Your Car

[MineralMan]

People do make mistakes. Most mistakes are avoidable or can be detected before they cause disasters. It is a mistake to text on your cell phone while you drive your car. Such mistakes lead to many deadly accidents. However, if you make that mistake, and you cause an accident that results in the injury or death of another person, the fact that you made that mistake does not remove your responsibility. You could even be charged with the crime of vehicular manslaughter. The same is true of drinking and driving. It is clearly a mistake to drink alcohol to the point of being intoxicated and then drive your car. That mistake is not an excuse, however, if someone dies due to your mistake.

Brand new bridges should not collapse and kill people. That's obvious. The entire process of building a bridge is very complex, from the engineering and design phase right through the construction. That process includes many points where mistakes can cause that bridge to collapse. That's why the process includes constant checks and inspections to make sure no mistakes are made. If the bridge ends up collapsing and killing people, obviously a mistake or mistakes were made. That is not an excuse, however. It is negligence. The negligence lies in knowing that there are many critical aspects to bridge design and construction but failing to ensure that those aspects were properly handled throughout the process.

Simply calling something an accident does not remove responsibility. If mistakes could have been avoided, but were not, then negligence is the reason for what happened. Then, someone, not an accident, is responsible for what occurred. If a brand new bridge collapses and kills people, someone or some group failed somewhere in the process of its design or construction. Negligence was involved.

Bridges do not fall by accident. They fall because someone or multiple people were negligent during the process of its construction. Mistakes do not remove responsibility. Mistakes cause accidents, because they involve negligence. Newly constructed bridges do not fall due to "mistakes." They fall due to negligence.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

1. Here is a commonly-used jury instruction defining negligence:

"Negligence is the failure to use reasonable care. Reasonable care is the degree of care that reasonably prudent persons would use under like circumstances to avoid injury to themselves or others. Negligence is the doing of something which a reasonably prudent person would not do, or the failure to do something which a reasonably prudent person would do, under like circumstances." A dictionary definition of "mistake" is "an error in action, calculation, opinion, or judgment caused by poor reasoning, carelessness, insufficient knowledge, etc." I'm not sure that as a practical matter there's a significant difference, although the term negligence has legal significance whereas mistake does not. The bridge collapsed because of some human error. It could have been a design error (somebody made a wrong calculation in the design), something wrong with the materials (a flaw in manufacturing them that should have been avoided, or that should have been found through inspection), or an error made during the assembly or placing of the bridge section. If the error constituted a failure to use reasonable care, that's legal negligence. I'm not sure why anyone would assume the bridge collapsed through no fault of anyone. I'd even throw in a touch of res ipsa loquitur, the legal principal that says one is presumed to be negligent if they had exclusive control of whatever caused the injury even though there is no specific evidence of an act of negligence, and without negligence the accident would not have happened.

The NTSB will investigate (they do a lot more than plane crashes) and they'll find out the causes (there is almost always more than one cause of any accident), but they will not assign legal liability (NTSB probable cause findings are not even admissible in negligence trials). That will be up to a court and a jury, although I doubt it will come to that.

[MineralMan]

2. Thanks for that jury instruction. It's well-written, I think.

My concern is that some are saying that the bridge collapse was just a "mistake." It was, of course, but brand new bridges, by definition, do not just collapse. That's why I wrote the post above. Mistakes are often due to negligence. In the case of an engineered structure, any mistakes should have been prevented or detected before the bridge was completed. That they were not indicates negligence.

Bridges are never designed or built to collapse. They are designed and built to serve as bridges. That bridge's collapse was not just a "mistake." It was caused by negligence at some point. Mistakes are not acceptable in bridge design and construction. They must be avoided, and a plan must be in place to prevent them from occurring. Apparently, that did not happen in this case.

[FarCenter]

5. Strangest thing I've heard air talent say "So far there's no evidence of a mistake being made."

Yet, there is a bridge lying across the roadway!

[MineralMan]

7. Isn't that the oddest thing?

Most people don't seem too bright much of the time.

That statement is patently ridiculous, yet I'm sure it was said in all seriousness. And heard that way, too, by many.

Sometimes, it seems like we are collectively losing our ability to reason.

[malaise]

3. Agree

That was no accident. Negligence is the word and there will be very serious law suits.

[Wwcd]

4. They were doing a load test, while traffic passes underneath

Link to tweet

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Link to tweet

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Link to tweet

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More pics & discussion here:

https://mobile.twitter.com/riotwomennn/status/974414906664644608

6 hours? "The bridge connects the university with the city of Sweetwater and was installed on Saturday in six hours over the eight-lane highway, according to a story that was posted on the university’s website.'

[Wwcd]

6. And now there's a foreign angle to the shoddy contractor

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100210366122

The stuff you find when you dig deeper.

[MineralMan]

8. Yes. That was stupid, for sure.

Not blocking traffic while testing was underway is obviously not a good idea. And yet...