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.
  • 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?