Way to go, Patrick!

THE EDITOR: Spectacular photographs recently published of the world’s tallest bridge in Southern France, show needle-like pillars topped with webs of cables suspending a deck 891 feet above the Tarn River valley. The Millau Bridge enables motorists to take a drive through the sky and at times, above the clouds. What is it that emboldens the French and other great nations to have this breadth, scope, grandness, majestic concept and above all, the ability to get things done, that simply can’t germinate in corpuscular states (Singapore excepted) that talk big, but act small? The French can build a soaring bride of 891 feet, but we can’t erect a 20 foot overpass! How Third World can we get?

It was only after the Millau Bridge was completed that the world heard about it. Prior to that, there was no publicised bickering, no hassle, no doubt, no recriminations, no commissions of enquiry, no political back-biting and above all, no procrastination. All we saw and heard was the magnificent result. Third World, defeatist thinking holds that it’s better to aim at an impossibly expensive and unfeasible bridge over troubled waters to Tobago, than a 20 foot overpass on the CR Highway. The latter is entirely affordable by a country drenched in God-given natural resources. These wild swings from the necessary, to the absurd are typical small-man thinking, and reflect feet of clay mired in the mud of immobility. Way to go, Patrick!

LLOYD CARTAR
Westmoorings