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The real cost of the Long Island bridge shutdown
By adamg on Sun, 10/12/2014 - 11:22am
It's not the cost of rebuilding the bridge, but of what happened to the people forced out in a frenzied two-hour evacuation, Kevin Cullen writes:
Before Long Island shut down, there was treatment on demand in and around the city for opiate addiction. Now, since Wednesday, the wait is up to three days. Three days is a death sentence for a lot of people addicted to heroin.
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Comments
Have a damn backup plan......
Get MEMA involved and have them practice emergency contingency plans. There are plenty of methadone/treatment facilities around.
Poorly Planned
This will go down in history as one of the most poorly planned events in the history of Boston...
Or Was It Deliberately Planned?
It has never been a secret
I used to work out on Long Island in the program for mentally ill homeless people I can tell you that the whole point of placing a program out there is that the rent was free and the rent was free because the city owned it and the city did not invest any money in maintaining The facilities
It was an infectious disease hospital built when investing money in infrastructure was actually done by government.
The fact that it isolated all of the unwanted people was just a bonus
The rent may have been free ,
The rent may have been free , but the logistics were costly. Plus the inevitability of the bridge needing to be reworked or replaced , which probably had two chances of happening , slim and none. So , with respect to health facilities , why weren't the unused ones , like Lemuel Shattuck , Boston State @Morton street , or the River street Mattapan Chronic Disease ? retasked ? Forget about the bridge , Long Island is going back to be an island. Find a new facility and do it up.
Good place for level-3&4 infectious diseases
While Long Island facilities may have been built to treat people with level-3 infectious disease (tuberculosis, Spanish flu?), it could be a place to put treatment and research for level 4 diseases like ebola. Better place than, say, BU's facility in Boston proper.
Nail on head?
Pure coincidence that this thing closes as the Ebola epidemic hits our shores? Hmmmm......
Maybe more prepared than we think?
No facilities for that
Ebola transmits via the same vectors as HIV, Hepatitis A, B, C, etc. It is contained by isolation and universal precautions. Universal precautions should be in strict usage anyway.
There are no facilities for patients on that island. Putting anybody with anything out there would be not only foolish, it would be dangerous to the public.
The island wasn't used to house people with these other diseases, it won't be used to house people with Ebola. The facilities for that are in pretty much every hospital in the Commonwealth.
Everybody just stop it.
Hows that isolation and universal precautions working out for ya
Or more specifically for the nurses in Texas or Spain?
We're dealing with people here - people who ignore protocols, people that have itches and wipe their face before properly disinfecting and so much more.
This is going to get a whole lot uglier before it's done.
How do you know what's on Long Island? Did our government inform you about the bunker at the Greenbrier based on your security clearance too?
In all honesty I was kidding. But it does seem awfully fishy that a bridge that's been on the verge of collapse for years suddenly gets closed on very short notice. Something doesn't add up about this story. Did somebody there have Ebola?
Someone check Stevil's temperature
Someone check Stevil's temperature, or maybe he's having a stroke. Is it a coincidence he favor's a conspiracy theory just the bridge is being closed?
What doesn't add up?
Wasn't it closed on short notice because the latest inspection revealed it was completely dangerous? It's not fishy so much as it shows how severe the maintenance issue was.
If you drive your car for many miles after your oil light goes on, it isn't sudden when your engine seizes. It's just that you were ignoring the clear warning signs that some problem needed to be addressed.
Maybe
But the bridge didn't seize - in all seriousness probably just a giant SNAFU in the sense of the origin of the phrase.
But it seems odd that the police (was it state/Boston something else) effectively came in to a facility housing homeless, recovering addicts etc. and said - EVERYBODY OUT - NOW!. The bridge may have been dangerous - but it doesn't sound like it was going to fall from the sky (I hope not with boats going under it). And in a serious pinch they could have evacuated people by boat - but can't imagine it was so unknowingly bad that it justified this behavior.
The whole thing is just bizarre - and a bit inhumane. My "Little" who's not so little any more from the Big Brother program was/is a client and he needed that facility. I have no way of contacting him and hope he now has an alternative.
Tipping point
My assumption is that there was a point of no return reached in terms of bridge safety where the best choice was to shut it down vs. just let even one more bus drive over the bridge. Drowning a bus load of homeless folks is not an acceptable risk and more than a little inhumane.
Really?
Even if you're trying to give them a bed for a night?? ;-)
I guess and as I said that's probably what happened - but still find it hard to believe you go from - this bridge is in seriously bad shape to " HEY YOU KIDS, GET OFFA MY ISLAND NOW!"
Ebola v. Hep & HIV
While I understand your technical point about the vector similarity in the gen pop, isn't ebola more of a challenge to healthcare workers due to the hemorrhagic of it? Seems like there is a lot more opportunity for fluid exposure with ebola.
How was the bridge issue not previously known?!
The bridge, obviously, is a relic. The City of Boston should be ashamed.
In that article this summer
In that article this summer that was written by a reporter who stayed over night he referenced how shakey the bridge was and how they had some precautions regarding vehicles crossing already.
Cullen exposes himself again as a phony and fraud
I enjoyed Kevin Cullen's column, if only for the usual hysterical laughter it produced. Thankfully, I'm still within the 10 free stories given away by the Globe each month. Do liberals really pay for this and feel like they're getting a gritty, city column? For years, Cullen worshiped at the feet of Tom Menino, the man almost entirely responsible for allowing the Long Island bridge to decay to the point of near collapse. Funny, Menino's name is never mentioned in Cullen's piece. Not once. Instead, Cullen attacks "the suits" of some drug rehab center forced to suddenly relocate off the island, as if it was their fault for not doing something sooner. Please. This is a classic case of blaming the victim. What a shame Cullen didn't ask the well-heeled "business leaders" how they had the clairvoyance to build state-of-the-art docks for multi-million dollar Camp Menino on Long Island. Did they know ten years ago that Menino wasn't going to maintain the bridge? Sure seems like it. Maybe Menino can sponsor another "Meet the Local Author" event for Cullen, this time on the docks of Long Island. I hear it's a great place to raise funds.
How about Fitzy and Fonzy and Sully on the BFD, or some of Cullen's "reliable" BFD sources (see his early marathon coverage). Couldn't the new "John S. Damrell" 70' BFD Fireboat take some of those needing treatment out to Camp Menino where the LPN mentioned could ride along and continue to treat them? By the way Cullen, you used the LPN's father for a column about the Southie Hockey Rink less than a year ago. No new material or subjects? What's next? "The black kid and the white kid" who meet at Children's Hospital and become fast friends, even though their parents hate each other and want their rooms changed? Amazing.