A 50-year-old bridge that collapsed in Pittsburgh had been rated as poor on a recent inspection report.
officials and engineering experts cautioned that doesn’t necessarily signal imminent danger for the thousands of other U.S. bridges with the same designation.
Infrastructure spending advocates noted there are thousands of bridges across the country with the same poor designation but few instances of collapse. Many said funding has not kept up with the need for repairs and replacements.The Federal Highway Administration's bridge inspection program was developed after the 1967 Silver Bridge collapse in West Virginia, which killed 46 people.
Inspectors, who are trained engineers, largely perform detailed visual inspections of the three major structures of a bridge — the deck on which vehicles drive, the structure that carries the deck, and the substructure or culverts that hold up that superstructure. Other inspection methods are used underwater or when needed to determine whether corrosion has affected the weight a bridge can carry.
New bridges are rated 9, and bridges with minimal or no wear are rated 7 or 8. Bridges considered in what the federal program deems fair or satisfactory condition — some signs of deterioration or minor loss or cracking — are rated 5 or 6. “When a bridge is added to the queue, it can be years before there’s funding to take care of those repairs, even if it’s added to the top of a state’s queue,” Hajjar said. “The engineers have been working to repair as much as they can. Safety and keeping safe bridges open is the goal, but the struggle is related to the insufficient funding that goes into repairing the aging infrastructure in this country, including bridges.
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