Civil Engineers and the Interstate System

I have been reading about the design/construction of the interstate system back in the 50s and 60s in my recent copy of Civil Engineering magazine. I won't bore anyone with any details but I am going to share a few lines from the article (I believe some of you will find them entertaining).

...during the first ten years of interstate construction - the period from 1956 to 1966 that McNichol dubs the interstate decade - civil engineers became genuine road warriors, battling the earth itself to put down mile after mile of modern superhighways on which most of the public could hardly wait to drive.

...the interstate engineers were armed with giant new construction equipment in the 1950s and 1960s that enabled them to put roads where they pleased. In Divided Highways, Lewis writes: "Many reveled in the sheer joy of building without attention to the consequences.... Should a mountain prove too high, just blast the top off or tunnel through. Should a ravine prove too deep, just fill it with stone and dirt. No river, lake, or arm of the ocean should be too wide or too deep for a bridge or causeway."

The power that highway engineers wielded during the 1950s and early 1960s helped produce what Lewis has labeled engineering hubris - the best or worst example of which is probably the proposal from the early 1960s to use atomic bombs to blast away part of the Bristol Mountains in Southern California to make way for a section of I-40. Lewis notes that the plan was approved by both California's highway department and the Atomic Energy Commission, which was eager to find peaceful uses for atomic energy. Ultimately, though, the idea was dropped - not for any of the reasons that might seem logical today but mainly because no one knew how long the radiation levels would remain too high in the blast area for road construction to resume...