5 minutes of news squeezed into 24 hours

[susandennis]

• A too big truck caused a bridge collapse an interstate highway between 2 small towns north of here.


• The driver/company is cooperating with authorities.


• 2 cars went into the water.


• No one killed. Injuries minor.


• Washington Department of Transportation asks you to avoid the area.


• There is a detour.

That's it.  That's the entire story.  There is no more to tell. No one got a video of the action.  The bridge is relatively small.  Pictorially, you can get the full story in about 2 shots.

And, yet, we've had about nonstop news of the event since it happened yesterday afternoon.  News anchors reading Twitter and Facebook reaction from idiots.  Chatting with each other about bridges and wide trucks.  Our ABC has a news barbie who was in Minneapolis when they had their huge bridge tragedy.  Last night she and the news ken seemed so disappointed that this was not even close to that.

NPR is covering it this morning with the local peops adding 5 minutes of NO other details - just the same 6 bullets over and over again.

I majored in communications in college and part of graduation requirement was to prepare an kind of minor 'thesis'.  Oh could I write the crap out of a How To Do It WRONG thesis about today's coverage of shit like this.  (As it was I got an A on my arrogant tome  arguing that Mr. Rogers Neighborhood was leading children down a ruinous path of entitlement.  I'm glad I don't have a copy of it, I'm sure it was horrible.  I got an A in most all my journalism stuff because I was the only girl in the department and they wanted to make sure they could brag about me.)

I have gotten better about not watching news from 5-7 every night.  I now watch the first few minutes of a couple of national news shows to get their headlines.  I also watch the first of a couple of local shows.  Then I try to watch something like Ellen during the news hole.  It's really stupid to watch and bitch and watch and bitch and watch and bitch.  I'm trying to break the cycle!!

Today is swimming. No class.  Alvin has my program all written out for me. He told me yesterday to pick it up at the front desk but Buchanan, at the front desk, knew about it but didn't have it.  I was in a rush to get home to meet Russell at 1:15 so I said I'd pick it up today.  So I'm not sure what I'll be doing but I know I'll find out when I get there and it will be lappy.

The pool is closed on Monday so I think I'll go and do laps on Sunday this week. I've been wanting to see what Sundays at the pool are like.  They are laps only - no lanes for vertical work so I've never been.  This week will be a good time to check it out.

OOOH I just got an email notice saying I had a Google Doc waiting for me - click here... What?  The url is a tinyurl.  Er, no thanks.  Funny. Gmail does such a spectacular job of scrubbing out shit that I haven't seen something like that in a long time.

Comments

[evilkyttn.livejournal.com]

In Australia they had problems with "truckies" not paying attention to signs that warn about height, so they installed water curtains that project a big STOP sign. If you haven't seen this before, watch the video and see - it's kinda neat:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoTMC-uxJoo (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoTMC-uxJoo)

America needs this kind of technology to prevent semi trucks from crashing into overpasses on the freeways and such...

[susandennis]

Interesting. Our infrastructure needs work but, the point I was trying to make is that our news coverage needs a truck to sink it so we can start all over again.

[fyremaven.livejournal.com]

I LOVE that water curtain. Very cool. Can't see any US money ever being spent on that, as it makes far too much sense. :D

[badrobot68.livejournal.com]

Thanks for that! I haven't been able to watch the news & now I won't have to sit through hours of their "tragedy porn".

[susandennis]

Softcore tragedy porn is, itself tragic!

[kyrielle]

I missed this until the last couple hours. They have found a security-cam video of it that is too grainy to see any details but which is being shared around the web incessantly.

If they want to have a discussion about our aging infrastructure and bridges where a single idiot can bring them down, great. But that isn't, I think, a discussion that needs to happen on our evening news. They can bring me the consensus, or the high points of each position if they can't find consensus. Provided said high points aren't too tall for any bridges en route to me, of course. ;)

so

[henare.livejournal.com]

in the local news here they're talking about finding a temporary bridge to cover the gap. my question: who has that crap just laying around?

Re: so

[susandennis]

Hertz Rent-a-Bridge?

[howeird]

I heard about the bridge when the alarm went off, since my alarm is KOMO radio. They were seriously missing the "where" part of the story. The only "who" they had was one of the survivors (they never ID-ed the truck driver or his pilot car driver).

But they did say it was I-5, and over the Skagit River, which was enough for me to find this on Google maps:
https://maps.google.com/maps?q=Mount+Vernon,+WA&hl=en&ll=48.444903,-122.341154&spn=0.007387,0.017917&sll=37.269174,-119.306607&sspn=9.07055,18.347168&oq=mount+vernon&hnear=Mt+Vernon,+Skagit,+Washington&t=m&z=16

If you enable the "traffic" view, they have the break tricked out with "do not enter" symbols.