77,000 US bridges in need of urgent repair
· Billions required to fix ageing structures
· Five dead and 8 missing after Minnesota collapse
Ewen MacAskill in Washington
Saturday August 4, 2007
The Guardian
About 77,000 bridges across the US share the same "structurally deficient" rating as the one that collapsed over the Mississippi in Minnesota, it emerged yesterday.
Transport specialists said billions of dollars would be needed to replace the bridges, many of which were built 40 to 50 years ago and were coming to the end of their life.
The Minnesota governor, Tim Pawlenty, said: "I think anybody who looks at the national picture, the national statistics, and says that we don't have a problem would be naive ... We have a major problem."
But the federal government and the public over the last few decades have proved unwilling to pay for the upkeep through substantial rises in petrol tax or more road and bridge tolls.
The bridge collapsed on Wednesday during the evening rush hour, claiming five lives. The police said yesterday that eight people were missing, reducing earlier estimates of 20-30.
There are 756 other bridges in the US with a near-identical design to the Minnesota one. But engineers insisted yesterday that the relatively low death toll vindicated the bridge design.
Joseph Schofer, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Northwestern University, in Illinois, said the bridge's underlying arch truss stopped heavy pieces of steel from falling on to vehicles after the collapse.
The federal authorities, responding to concern about the thousands of bridges designated as structurally deficient, insisted that the Minneapolis collapse had been an "anomaly".
President George Bush, who was widely criticised for staying on holiday at his Crawford ranch in Texas after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans two years ago, is to visit the bridge site today.
Harry Reid, the Democratic leader in the Senate, said that domestic programmes, such as replacing ageing infrastructure, had been short-changed because of the billions being spent on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
"Since 9/11 we have taken our eye off the ball," he said.
The Democrats had proposed spending $631m (£309m) more on federal highway safety than Mr Bush budgeted for but he had threatened to veto the proposal.
William Wilkins, of Trip, a transport thinktank, estimated that $65bn would be needed to replace the ageing bridges.
An inspection of the collapsed bridge in the 1990s found cracks caused by fatigue and corrosion and these were repaired.
Dan Dorgan, the state bridge engineer, speaking to reporters at the site yesterday, said a recent study had raised concerns about cracks. The state had a choice of adding steel plates or carrying out a further inspection, and had opted for the latter. "We thought we had done all we could. Obviously something went terribly wrong," he said.