I have no idea what the details of this story are because there was no one around to ask. What it looks like is that someone heaved a hefty chunk of concrete into the windshield of this car and left it where it fell. I shot this photo around noon on Saturday while walking up […]
About 75 acres of undeveloped land surrounding Albany’s Timber Ridge School is about to come into city ownership because the owners have made no payments on assessments for the street and utility lines there. Now it’s just a question of how the transaction is done, the city council was told. The land has been owned by the […]
The collapse of a bridge on Interstate 5 north of Seattle once again reminds us that our bridges need constant attention, maintenance and occasional repairs. I can’t say whether we’re doing enough on that score in Oregon, but ODOT is certainly doing a lot. A few weeks ago I mentioned the work to protect the […]
In the immigration debate in the U.S. Senate, all of the attention is on amnesty for some 11.5Â million illegal aliens, and on whether and how this could be conditioned on having secured the southern border. As a writer in the Wall Street Journal pointed out on Saturday, a more important question is how to […]
By and large, Oregon’s public meetings law works pretty well. So there’s no big reason to try to fix it. The House Rules Committee, though, is holding a public hearing on Wednesday (May 22) on House Bill 3513, which attempts to refine the definition of when public bodies, like a city council or county […]
Ever notice that street and traffic planners expect us to be able to see through objects and around corners? That’s the feeling you get driving around Albany and, I think, many other small towns with mostly narrow streets. Here’s an example of some kind of big utility box placed next to one of the driveways of […]
Our bridges: The “scour” concern
Our highway bridges over the Willamette River are not likely to fall down like the one on I-5 over the Skagit River. That one was of a design where failure of one member causes a collapse, and it got hit by a tall load. But there is one potential concern with the bridges we have […]
Tags: ODOT, scour-critical, Willamette River bridges