A bridge that crosses the Yellowstone River in Montana collapsed, plunging a freight train carrying hot asphalt and molten sulfur into the rushing water below. No injuries were reported. Officials shut down drinking water intakes downstream while they evaluated the danger from the accident Saturday morning. Railroad crews were at the scene near the town of Columbus, about 40 miles west of Billings. The river was swollen with recent heavy rains although it is unclear whether that contributed to the bridge collapse. The Yellowstone saw record flooding in 2022 that caused extensive damage to Yellowstone National Park and adjacent towns in Montana.
    • OOFshoot@beehaw.org
      63·
      2 years ago

      We’ve been warning about dangerous infrastructure for years now. It’ll only get worse until we start building for the next millennium.

      • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
        41·
        2 years ago

        Sure, and that future likely involves a lot of trains.

        I want super high speed rail instead of airplanes. I want regular high speed rail instead of highways. I want medium speed rail instead of roads. And so on. The technology is there, and we already have the land for most of it, we just need to stop building so many roads and actually build solid rail infrastructure.

        • Naura@startrek.website
          1·
          1 year ago

          Agreed.

          I live in the Bay Area and because of my anxiety I can’t drive, but I can get to most places I need to be by BART/light rail.

          it’s just one mode of transportation. In Japan also have a comprehensive bus system as well as small towns you can only get by car which rail trains use to service in the 1900s.

          People will still have cars. We’ll still have roads and their big dick trucks. I don’t understand how this is a bad idea. LA to Vegas high speed would have been amazing. I lived in oak hills by the 15 seeing the traffic and how many people die on the pass due to car accidents was just horrifying.

          • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
            7·
            2 years ago

            Sure, that should be an option too!

            If you visit Europe or Japan, you’ll find that trains and airplanes both exist, and both are popular and inexpensive. That’s what I’d like to see happen elsewhere in the world as well, rely less on personal vehicles and more on mass transit, though preserve each as an option.

        • Antik@lemmy.ml
          1128·
          2 years ago

          Por que no los dos?

          No one is going to build a train stop near Ione, NV, one of the places I went to on a road trip.

          I don’t understand why it has to be a zero sum game.

          edit: seems like the fuckcars cult has infested Lemmy. lmfao that sucks. It’s cool though, because not even you cultists can bring me down. Oh and just to clarify: I definitely agree with where you guys are coming from, but you take it to an xtreme that I can’t get on board with.

          • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
            23·
            2 years ago

            Sure, we can absolutely have both, we should just be preferring mass transit to personal transit for populated areas.

            In my area, we have:

            • one major corridor with a big highway (5+ lanes) and a commuter train line
            • a light rail system in the urban area, with some branches extending to the suburbs
            • old freight rail line that connects to the existing light rail system and passes through several suburban areas, but doesn’t have light rail service
            • long stretches of “nothing” (~50 miles) to smaller metro areas, and after a few hundred miles goes to a popular tourist destination

            We’ve been having more traffic recently, so what’s the state-wide transportation system’s decision? Delay expansion of rail and expand the highway.

            What we should instead be doing is:

            1. extend light rail through existing rail line through busy corridor - great alternative to the commuter rail since it goes different places
            2. increase housing density along rail lines through zoning changes, and mix in commercial zoning w/ residential
            3. improve cycling and pedestrian infrastructure with a focus on connecting to rail infrastructure
            4. reroute cars to make it less convenient to get around in the city by car - i.e. nudge people toward using transit instead of personal vehicles

            Transit will never fully replace personal vehicles, but it can drastically reduce the need for driving within urban and suburban areas. Rail lines are a lot cheaper to maintain than roads, and trains can carry a lot more people than cars. In other words, if we can get people to use trains more than cars, we can reduce our spending on transportation infrastructure.

            We should absolutely keep and improve our existing highway infrastructure, but we should also be phasing out a lot of our road infrastructure in densely populated areas in favor of mass transit options that move people more efficiently.

          • sinkingship@sh.itjust.works
            252·
            2 years ago

            No, nothing has “infested” Lemmy. It’s just that many people understand, that rails are much more efficient than roads and that individual traffic on large scale has no future. At least if you want our future to be survivable.

          • Silviecat44@vlemmy.netEnglish
            53·
            2 years ago

            I agree with you! Fuckcars takes it to such an extreme I find it very very difficult to side with them. Cars have their uses

      • airportline@lemmy.mlEnglish
        14·
        2 years ago

        It’ll only get worse until we start building for the next millennium.

        I guess we’re fucked then

        • OOFshoot@beehaw.orgEnglish
          7·
          2 years ago

          Yeah, I agree. It’s not hard to build infrastructure that lasts forever, it’s just no one wants to pay for it.

          • Eldritch@lemmy.worldEnglish
            7·
            2 years ago

            I would gladly pay for it. Unfortunately most of us that would gladly pay for it can’t afford to pay for it. And the people that could afford to pay for it don’t get rich by spending their own money. They want everyone else to spend their money on it so they can use it for free.

            • Applesauce@lemmy.worldEnglish
              6·
              2 years ago

              To build that infrastructure, an increase in taxes will be needed. The middle and lower tax brackets can’t afford any additional taxes at this time, so that leaves corporations and the upper tax brackets that will need to foot the bill. They don’t want that, so they pay to have campaigns of ignorance blasted at the masses to induce fear of any tax reform.

              At the end of the day, nothing gets fixed and the wealthy keep their money.

              • stankbucket@lemmy.worldEnglish
                4·
                2 years ago

                Or things get fixed at 10x what the actual costs should be because the people who award the contract are paid with part of that excess and it helps them keep the seat that allows them to continue funneling money.

  • tl;dr bot@lemmy.worldB
    402·
    2 years ago

    tl;dr:

    COLUMBUS, Mont. - A bridge that crosses the Yellowstone River in Montana collapsed early Saturday, plunging portions of a freight train carrying hazardous materials into the rushing water below. David Stamey, the county’s chief of emergency services, said there was no immediate danger for the crews working at the site, and the hazardous material was being diluted by the swollen river. The area is in a sparsely populated section of the Yellowstone River Valley, surrounded by ranch and farmland. The river there flows away from Yellowstone National Park, which is about 110 miles southwest. ADVERTISEMENT. The Yellowstone saw record flooding in 2022 that caused extensive damage to Yellowstone National Park and adjacent towns in Montana.

    I am a bot in training. Feedback

      • stankbucket@lemmy.world
        7·
        2 years ago

        And thank you government for allowing the continued sale of all power to the highest bidder because of your refusal to punish open bribery.

        • Eldritch@lemmy.world
          44·
          2 years ago

          Government is us. We’ve got no one to blame for this but ourselves. I mean people like you and myself might see this as the obvious problem. But far too many people are oblivious or simply don’t have a problem with it. Or have been made to feel that we have little resource for it and simply must accept it.

    • BrooklynMan@lemmy.mlEnglish
      5·
      2 years ago

      A huge infrastructure bill got passed recently. Of course, that doesn’t mean it all gets fixed right away.

    • Shinhoshi@infosec.pubEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      Funny seeing you here! Can you explain the “Usonian” thing?

      I get it refers to the US, but not past that…

      • Soviet Snake@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
        5·
        2 years ago

        Well, I’m a Latinamerican, and we kind of hate people from the US are called American, but that term is kind of shitty since everyone in the Americas are American, so they are appropriating of something it’s not only theirs. In Spanish that word doesn’t even exist, we use “Estadounidense” which translates to something as “Statesian”, but in my opinion it’s not that good of a term. In Esperanto there’s the word “Usono” which means the same, so I adapted it more to an English style “Usonian”. There’s a really good song by Residente, who previously was part of Calle 13, that talks about this, and he did it as a response to Childish Gambino’s “This is America”. Its English subtitles are pretty decent, so you can listen to it that way. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GK87AKIPyZY

        • Shinhoshi@infosec.pubEnglish
          1·
          2 years ago

          Thanks for the explanation! I agree that it would be nice to have a word for estadounidense in English too.

          Also, can you explain “encabronao” at 0:45 in the video? Why wouldn’t it be “encabronado”?

          I liked the song, thanks for sharing it!

      • grue@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        2 years ago

        As far as I know, it’s a Frank Lloyd Wright thing about radical decentralization/individualism.

        Most sources on the web are unhelpful because they only talk about it as applied to architecture, but he had a bunch of ideas about urban planning (or rather, anti-urban planning) that are much less well known and get drowned out in the noise.

        Here’s one half-decent article I’ve managed to find about it

        The TL;DR is that Wright liked the idea of basically replacing cities with endless suburbia/Jeffersonian hobby farms interspersed with small towns, such that everything would be self-contained/self-sufficient. Or something like that, anyway. (In hindsight, the legacy of Wright’s idea is that American society took the “spread everything out” part without the “and get rid of cities” part and invented disastrous suburban sprawl.)

        Anyway, I think “usonian” is being used here to allude to the idea of failing to provide sufficient Federal funding for infrastructure because of misguided individualism, maybe?

  • ImFresh3x@sh.itjust.works
    71·
    2 years ago

    Hmm last nights news was way more entertaining.

    Lately we had:

    Extra juicy Trump indictments

    Suspenseful submarine countdown

    Andrew Tate charged

    Putin’s military disregarding his orders while under imminent threat

    I’m sure I missed something else.

    Gonna be hard to top that. And I’m not sure I want anything to.