Know your dangerous bridges!

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In light of the recent catastrophe in Minneapolis involving the I-35 W bridge, MSNBC has posted a map of the United States that lists all of the 77,000 (! !! !! !) deficient or obsolete bridges...

Obsolete is "better" than Deficient,

The bridge that collapsed in Minnesota had a score of 50...

There is a bridge I travel on a lot that has a score of 8. That would be the Penn St. Bridge in Reading, PA...

There are several others that have scores well below 50...

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20093413/

If there are bridges that are structurally deficient, write a letter to your local newspaper, call a state congress(wo)man, and let them know about it.

Let's all move to Nevada... it only has 1200 bridges. And only 12% are deficient or obsolete...

Sounds like a paradise.

There are a couple of bridges that are in my local area that I will be thinking twice about before driving across. According to MSNBC, one of the local ones is built like the one in Minneapolis but thirty years older, is also "structurally deficient," and has a 43 out of 100 rating. I'd say that it's time for that one to be replaced, but since there is a brand new bridge just up the river (and that one took decades to get the funding for) it might not be rebuilt. A drawback of diverting traffic completely to the new bridge if the old one is closed might economically hurt the downtown district of one of the towns the old bridge connects and which the route it carries leads into.

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where i live, this is a single bridge, built in the 1960's. I dont know why their is 2 entries, they both must be the same thing, only .1 difference in grade. Heh, they r replacing this bridge next year, itll take almost a year, and will severly hurt buisness, better then collapsing i suppose.

some are labeled not good not because they will break but due to only holding say 500,000 pounds that means no more than 10 semi on them at a time. And some are very narrow and do not hold alot of mass. A local bridge they listed was replaced in 2006 after that list was done ie a outdated list. so yes some need fixing and replacement but not as many as you think.

Today I drove a ways from where i live to a town called Victory here in NYS. Recently a bridge around that area colapsed and i was headed that way for a hike at a DEC island where a very old bridge sits with concrete blocks to prevent cars on it, but we walked on it.

What is the likely hood of being involved in this catastrophe?

First of all 140,000 or let's say 200,000 people crossed the bridge each day.

Since there were 100 people involved in the this, with 200,000 crossing each day, you had a 1 out of 2000 chance of being involved in that bridge accident.

The likely hood of you being involved in your bridge collapsing is related to how many people cross at a time, how long it takes you to cross, and how much your state is willing to blame the Federal president for not keeping the bridge in maintenance.

This would be better suited to news and current events or random discussion.

I blaim the federal president, not for the catastra F*&% that day but for everything else. Hah!

There's only 1 bridge that scored less than a 70 around here. But then again, there's no large bridges "here" either...

I FINALLY get over my bridge fear(almost), and have others in the family on the way there....

And i now know that most of the bridges i or my family might cross, are at best obsolete.


So much for trying to get out of the house more.

tyger

A couple of them around here...then I'm sure there are others that aren't even big enough to make the chart, one lane, back road bridges just spanning a big enough drop to kill you if they decide to go...I watch them slowly crumbling away more and more every year around here.