Gripe, gripe, gripe

What could go wrong with a beautiful cable stay bridge if the anchor plates warp? I don't think we want to find out some February during a nor'easter.

What I definitely do not want is bland reassurances from public officials. If Bernard Cohen and Michael Capuano want to reassure me, they'll give me facts that reassure me, not just words.

I also don't want he-said, she-said, dueling-report stories from the press. There are actual facts out there somewhere, even if they're not in the reports themselves. Here are a few critical questions the reporter should have asked:

• What tests (x-rays, ultrasound, whatever) did Wiss Janney perform to reassure themselves and the state Department of Transportation that the warping they found is safe? (Today's follow-up story suggests that they didn't perform any tests, that they simply noted the proximity of warping to welds and excused it because of that.)
• Did the state deploy any instruments to determine whether the warping is getting worse, particularly in light of the fact that the number of known warped plates has grown from three to six? If not, why (the hell) not?
• What record-keeping and reinspection is the state doing to monitor the scope of the warping?
  

"I don't know," might have been the answer, but even that presumably temporary ignorance would inform me, the reader, enough to make my own judgement instead of guessing whose report is correct.

With all this said, it appears that the main disagreement is how fast to progress the investigation. Capuano was asking the right questions, and Cohen, despite what sounds like a bureaucrat's instinct to minimize problems, seems to be following up. But I'm a grown-up; give me the straight story.

Of course, the press doesn't ever print all of an interview, even in an interview format. The public officials may have said what I want to hear.

For those who've never been interviewed or who like to talk (me, most politicians, Tom Hanks in You've Got Mail), the cardinal rule of message control with the press is: Have your message ready, deliver your message, and then put the rest of the conversation off the record. (Gets you out of the interview quicker, too!)

In this case, I would have said, "We think our engineering report is right, but we take these questions seriously, and we will stay on top of the structural health of the bridge so that it's never an immediate risk." Or, better, "X-ray crystallography shows that the warps occurred during welding on the first three plates. We'll be performing similar tests on the latter three, as well as repeating the tests on the first set to see if there has been any further warping."