How Are NY’s Bridges?
R News
by Bill Carey
It was back in 1987 that a bridge collapsed and claimed 10 lives in New York State.
The disaster at the Schoharie Bridge on the State Thruway led to a round of inspections focused on bridge safety. Accidents, like the one in Minneapolis, leave many wondering whether New York State learned its lesson 20 years ago.
We hardly notice in our daily rush to work and home and stops along the way. We take the safety of our highway system for ranted. We believe that advances in technology have made the network of bridges and overpasses that we rely on, safe.
In the past, we had failures due to lack of knowledge. Now, we’re having failures because of a lack of maintenance,” Riyad Aboutaha of Syracuse University’s School of Engineering said.
Aboutaha is training a new generation of civil engineers at Syracuse University’s School of Engineering. He’s done work in the past for the Federal Highway Safety Administration. He said we need to pay more attention to the safety issue.
More than 25 percent of New York’s bridges are deemed deficient, in need of serious repairs or rebuilding.
For the public, he said, there is no need for panic, but real cause for concern.
“Most of the bridges that are classified as structurally deficient, not necessarily they are in danger of collapsing. However, the margin of safety is smaller than the original margin of safety in the original design,” Aboutaha said.
Case in point, the many overpasses that carry routes 81 and 690 through the city of Syracuse. Inspections showed serious deterioration in support structures holding up those highways. A massive repair effort has now been completed to strengthen those supports.
And, it may have come just in time.
The corrosion had gotten so bad, in some cases, the experts said that something as minor as a truck running off a city street, hitting one of these pillars, could have brought down a bridge and a highway.
The way to avoid deterioration and potential disaster? Simple, regular and timely maintenance.
“If we had the adequate resources to do so, the financial resources and that’s the main key of why our bridges are in this condition at this time. We have large numbers of bridges that are structurally deficient because we do not have adequate resources,” said Aboutaha.
Until those resources are made available, he said, states like New York will continue to try to keep one step ahead of disaster.
The latest available Federal Report lists more than 2,100 bridges in New York State under the structurally deficient category. Of those, 222 service the Interstate highway system.
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