PECG
1 HN recommender · recommended in 3 months, 2021–2023
26:54 · 91K views · Jan 21, 2015
A half-hour television special on the 2007 fiery collapse of a connector in the Bay Area's MacArthur Maze and its rebuilding in 26 days. It was produced for the Professional Engineers in California Government.
HN cites it as proof that infrastructure can be rebuilt very fast when incentives and urgency line up.
4 comments from Hacker News
There's also the MacArthur Maze collapse in the Bay area 2007 [1] The overpass collapsed on April 29th. They had it reopened to traffic 26 days later. This was American leadership, project management and engineering at it's finest [2]. [1] [LINK] [2] this video
For a counter example, the rebuilding of the MacArthur Maze in 26 days back in 2007. [LINK] > A contractor with a proven track record of rebuilding damaged freeways (most notably the Santa Monica Freeway after the 1994 Northridge earthquake) well ahead of schedule, C. C. Myers, Inc., submitted a winning bid of $876,075 to repair the damage to the I-580 connector. The bid was estimated to cover only one-third of the cost of the work, but the firm counted on making up the shortfall with an incentive of $200,000 per day if the work was completed before June 27, 2007. > On the evening of Thursday, May 24, the I-580 connector re-opened, just before the busy Memorial Day weekend. The deadline to finish the project was beaten by over a month, with the contractor earning the $5 million bonus for early completion. The entire reconstruction project was completed only 26 days after the original accident. Amazing: The Rebuilding the MacArthur Maze - this video
Plenty of examples of massive speedups in repairs: 1: [LINK] 2: this video It's not that we can't "build quickly," but that we can't build anything _new_ quickly.
What developers think when they hear 'aggressive timeline': [LINK] What managers think: this video Point being, nobody gets a documentary about themselves made for delivering against a boring deadline.