1 in every 13 bridges in America is in ‘poor’ condition. Thousands could collapse from a collision
CNN
A container ship colliding into the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore is drawing attention to the state of the more than 600,000 bridges in America, and their vulnerabilities.
A container ship colliding into the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore is drawing attention to potential vulnerabilities among some of America’s more than 600,000 bridges. The Key Bridge stood for 47 years, and in that time it never received the sort of jolt that anyone could have thought would bring it down. But when the Dali, a ship weighing more than 100,000 tons, smashed into it, the bridge tumbled in less than a minute. While such a catastrophic collapse might not have been entirely predictable, bridge collapses as the result of collisions aren’t entirely unheard of, and this one may have been avoidable. Recent federal safety inspections of the Key Bridge found it to be in “fair” condition, and Maryland’s governor said the bridge was “fully up to code.” But thousands of US bridges are in bad shape. In America, 46,000 bridges have aging structures and are in “poor” condition, and 17,000 are at risk of collapse from a single hit, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers and the federal government. Extreme weather events, increasingly heavy trucks and collisions from larger container ships pose significant risks to US bridges, engineers and other infrastructure experts say. States inspect US highway bridges at least once every two years and classify them “good,” “fair” or “poor.” A bridge found to be in poor condition has some structural elements of the bridge in a state of “advanced deterioration.”