Re: Very sad, but...
Bit of a selection bias there! The old stuff that collapsed 5 yrs after building has long since been built over and forgotten. There is also some case that structural reliability was not well understood so buildings were over engineered, e.g those gothic cathedrals which supposedly could lose a great deal of the stone if redesigned with modern methods.
The Arecibo affair reminds me of the Forth Bridge (Scotland! in case there are any others...) where only relatively recently did they discover severe corrosion problems in the support cables. Of course there the money had to be found to put up a new bridge as it is a major transport route.
For a science facility it's only a pity a some philanthropic tech mogul couldn't have been tapped for the money (Bezos? Gates? Musk? Branson?).
Biting the hand that feeds IT
