This is a really good article. Amazing how a dozen+ different things combined to produce the unfortunate result. Perfect case study in there being no such thing as a singular 'root cause'.
Often it is good to wait for an entire report to nail down the facts before the witch hunt should begin, is there something in this case that means this isn't the best idea?
One of the undercurrent themes of this story is that, according to the herald, the construction company and FIU officials are well-connected politically. Possibly related to this is the fact that the Herald is suing the state for records related to the bridge [0]. These records were determined to be public but have so far been withheld from public release.
[0] http://www.miamiherald.com/news/state/article212489364.html
It certainly doesn't look good from this quoted paragraph...
"Public records made and received by the Department from February 20 until the bridge collapsed on March 15 obviously were not obtained by the Department during an investigation because there had been no accident, much less an investigation into an accident,'' he wrote in a response to the FDOT motion to dismiss the lawsuit.
"Florida law is clear that if an agency’s record is a public record at the time it is made or received, then that document does not lose its character as a public record if the document is later given to an investigative agency in the course of a subsequently initiated investigation."
Still could be to prevent a public outcry before the facts are in, but that does seem mighty fishy...
I'd suggest that it's not an issue of bad faith regarding the NTSB, but rather that the NTSB doesn't (and shouldn't!) care about the political fallout from this, whereas a newspaper very much has an interest in uncovering the political side of this.
Beyond them, there are a large number of potential officials that could have leaned on / been leaned on or through nepotism or laziness been a part (or not part) of the planning, design, implementation etc of the bridge that are partly or largely responsible for design/funding choices to this bridge.
There are countless examples of people receiving undue flak before being conclusively proven as guilt free, it is often prudent to wait before leveling accusations - that is what the NTSB does in it's processes - often to a fault.
I think it is unnecessary snark to ask me if the bridge collapsed, please don't be crude.
To be clear, I fully trust the NTSB. It’s more that I want to make sure that there are checks and balances — even when a just agency is doing the reporting. It adds another protection layer to the system.
People are often very forgiving when they know what actually happened. But being shut out of the information flow is a problem.
I'm not saying we need to find the guilty and punish them, but there are people that have a real stake in finding out the story.
The Miami Herald is suing to get more material so that it can run more speculative headlines, which doubtless is great for the Miami Herald, because it drives revenue from selling papers and from advertising. But unlike the NTSB the Miami Herald has no real interest in the prevention of future harm.
Accident investigators like the NTSB need legal protection so that they get honest answers, in the service of the prevention of future harm. The harder you make it for them to do that job, the less effective they are.
There's often a fantasy in play in which people suppose that surely if everything was out in the open we'd fix all these problems, wouldn't we? But we've actually run that experiment already and the results were not good. Without the methodical independent investigation big vested interests are able to direct the narrative as they choose. And their interest isn't preventing future harm... except to themselves. So nothing improves, you will read the same stories, and be pointed at the same scapegoats, forever.
The specific focus on _preventing future harm_ is what's important about accident investigators. You might think a court seems like the right place, but courts are about _justice_ which isn't interested in future harm at all. Here's a nice modern British example that shows this difference:
A young woman drunkenly leans against a train as it departs, to the horror of those inside the train she falls and is killed.
The accident investigators look at that and their concern is: How should we prevent similar things happening? They look at lots of evidence as to exactly what happened and when, they interview people, they review the technology in place, and they make recommendations for how we can prevent the same tragedy re-occurring.
The court says: The train guard has a legal responsibility towards passengers, the evidence shows he did not do everything by the book, and a passenger died. If you have a legal responsibility but you don't do things by the book and someone dies, that's manslaughter. Guilty. Prison.
https://www.amazon.com/Just-Culture-Balancing-Safety-Account...
That is to be expected. Real world projects are usually resilient enough, that only when a lot of things align catastrophic failure happens, AKA Swiss Cheese model [1]