Bridges still need repairs

By The Daily Progress

Published: August 4, 2008

Engineers had already warned that bridges, and highway infrastructure in general, were crumbling with decay.

Reports and studies and warnings generally went unheeded.

Then the collapse of the Minneapolis bridge a year ago last August gave us a tragic picture of what could happen when unsafe bridges were allowed to remain in use.
As it turns out, the Minneapolis story is more complicated than first believed.

For one thing (although final assessments have not been made), it is a design flaw — not a maintenance problem — that has been cited as the critical factor in the bridge’s failure.

Still, that collapse — which killed 13 people — immediately sparked calls for improved maintenance and for repair of bridges known to be deficient.

A year later, what has been accomplished?

Not much, according to an Associated Press analysis, which looked at the 20 busiest structurally deficient bridges in each state.
Just slightly more than 10 percent of the bridges had been repaired in the past year.
The bridges are not in imminent danger of collapse. But they need attention sooner rather than later.

Efforts to address deficient bridges face a myriad of obstacles, notes the AP, from escalating costs, to daunting work backlogs, to the politicization of funding.
Some critics blame the states for not doing enough, others blame the federal government.

Virginia is one of many states where political gridlock has doomed new funding initiatives to deal with road problems.
At the federal level, an increase of $1 billion for transportation has been proposed, but it is an amount the White House says it will veto.

The estimate cost for bridge repairs alone is $140 billion.
The current federal highway act calls for spending $41 billion a year.

But what Congress says it will do and what Congress actually does are two separate things.
States will actually receive only about $27 billion next year in federal money — $14 billion less than national law requires.
At this rate, and with their own fiscal problems at the statehouse level, states are hard-pressed to keep up with highway maintenance and repair demands.

All this is a far cry from the optimistic 1950s and ’60s, when federal initiative built gleaming new interstate highways for a nation on the go toward bigger and better things.
We built those interstates, but have failed to keep them in good working order.
We will pay for that shortsightedness.
Highway maintenance and repair may be costly — but failure is costlier still.

“Thirteen people were killed [last August] and not much happened,” said William Schutt, an engineer who is an outspoken critic of the status quo in bridge assessment and repair.
“Who’s to blame? Congress, the American people — for putting up with it.”