Photo by Joey McLeister/Minneapolis Star Tribune/MCT
by Frank James
A lot of people today are obviously considering the safety of the nation’s bridges.
The Federal Highway Administration, part of the Transportation Department, has a website which provides useful and sobering information on the nation’s bridge inventory.
According to FHA data, if I added correctly, there are almost 600,000 bridges in the U.S., 596,808 to be exact.
Of those bridges, 73,794 were deemed “structurally deficient” as of December 2006, or about 12.4 percent of the total. The Minneapolis bridge was among them.Clearly, even structurally deficient bridges aren’t collapse prone or else we’d be seeing a lot more tragedies like that experienced by Minneapolis. There’s a fair amount of engineering that evidently still keeps them standing.
But it’s probably safe to say that quite a few of them are probably a cause for worry.
That’s what Jim Burnett, the former chair of the National Transportation Safety Board, seemed to be saying,. He was quoted in the Minneapolis Star Tribune saying:
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“A structurally deficient bridge might be one not adequate for the traffic it takes, but not necessarily dangerous. But a lot of structurally deficient bridges are dangerous.”
A chilling thought for the millions of Americans who must travel across those spans, sometimes twice a day.