Editorial for March 20, 2008 edition:


Just say something!

Responsibility is a dirty word for too many people these days. At the Fox Chase Recreation Center, vandals have wreaked havoc on a concession stand and clubhouse. The vandals presumably are teens, but don’t presume that these hoodlums have parents, because parents — good parents, anyway — are supposed to keep tabs on their kids.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that parents need to put their kids on shorter leashes before they let them roam the streets and loiter at the recreation center. And parents whose children violate the law should face stiff penalties and be forced to pay restitution — no ifs, ands, buts or excuses.
The quality-of-life atrocities in Fox Chase, however, pale in comparison to what’s happened under I-95 in Port Richmond, where motorists who use the crumbling interstate along with motorists, merchants and shoppers on the street below were in jeopardy until the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation abruptly closed the freeway late Monday after an engineer discovered a huge crack in a support pillar beneath the Richmond Street overpass.
The crack didn’t happen overnight. Any merchant, police officer, pedestrian — ANYBODY — who noticed the crack weeks or months ago should have raised holy hell back then.
"Not catching something like this certainly could have been tremendously tragic," Mayor Michael Nutter noted on Tuesday.
In light of last year’s deadly bridge collapse in Minneapolis, prudence and overcaution are justified when it comes to infrastructure inspection. This time around, somebody dropped the ball. I-95 motorists and the world beneath I-95 are incredibly lucky that PennDOT’s failure to be proactive much earlier did not result in loss of life. From this point forward, everyone must be more responsible. ••

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