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A Year After Minnesota Bridge Collapse, Illinois Stays the Course on Inspections
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Gatehouse News Service
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04 August 2008
PEORIA, Ill. - In the immediate aftermath of last year's collapse of the Interstate-35W bridge in Minneapolis, all varieties of federal, state and local officials rushed to assure the country that its bridges were safe and efforts would be redoubled to keep them that way.
So what are Illinois bridge inspectors doing differently today, one year removed from the Minnesota catastrophe that killed 13 people and one year into this new era of heightened attention to bridge health?
"To be honest, nothing really," said Mark Eckhoff, a bridge maintenance engineer with the Illinois Department of Transportation's District 4 in Peoria. "But that's because we were already doing so much before the collapse and were already focused on bridge safety.
"We really haven't changed anything that we do in a substantial way," he said. "We're still out there on schedule inspecting and maintaining bridges."
A year ago, there were eight bridges in the Tri-County Area carrying 20,000 or more vehicles daily that were labeled "structurally deficient." (The list did not include any Illinois River bridges.)
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"Structurally deficient" is an engineering term that sounds scary but only means a bridge needs to be monitored or repaired. That the term also applied to the I-35W bridge in Minnesota, however, instills little confidence - at least among non-engineers - that a "structurally deficient" bridge is not a bridge in imminent danger of failure.
But history and statistics support the fact that structurally deficient bridges are not doomed bridges. In Illinois, about 16 percent of the state's 26,000 bridges are classified as "structurally deficient" - the sixth lowest percentage in the United States - and no other major bridge has collapsed since the beginning of the Interstate Highway System in the 1950s or even long before that.
IDOT's District 4 is responsible for the inspection and upkeep of more than 700 bridges. In the last year, the list of structurally deficient bridges in the Tri-County Area was reduced by only one, when the reconstruction of U.S. Route 24 over Kickapoo Creek in Bartonville finished earlier this year.
Repairs to another deficient "bridge" - a culvert spanned by I-74 - over the Kickapoo Creek tributary, just west of Koerner Road, are included in IDOT's road plan and could begin in 2010.
Changes on the horizon
Six bridges on I-74 at the intersection with I-155 and at the Morton exit remain "structurally deficient." Of those, four need new decks and are scheduled to be reconstructed. The other two are over abandoned railroad tracks, which will be removed and filled in with dirt. The project is in the design phase - it will include reconstruction of the Morton interchange - and should begin the construction phase in 2012 or 2013, Eckhoff said.
In the meantime, those six bridges are on a one-year inspection schedule. Most bridges are inspected once every two years - newer bridges every four years - unless special circumstances dictate they be inspected more often.
No new bridges have been added to the "structurally deficient" list, which means all the high-profile bridges - the ones that span the Illinois River - are in relatively good shape.
All those bridges were inspected in the days following the Minneapolis bridge collapse on Aug. 1, 2007.
Also inspected immediately were the ones in the Peoria area designed similarly to the I-35W bridge. They include the eastbound portion of the McClugage Bridge, which originally was built in 1948 but rehabilitated in 2000; the Cedar Street Bridge, connecting South Peoria with East Peoria; the Fondulac Bridge over I-74 in East Peoria; and Harmon Highway/Illinois Route 116 over Kickapoo Creek in Peoria County. No problems were noted with any of those bridges.
Safety and concern
Bradley University engineering professor Riyadh Hindi, a structural engineer who has designed and built bridges, is concerned about the country's aging inventory of bridges (the average age is 43 years old). He believes, though, the state is doing what it can to keep up with inspections and repairs.
"In Illinois, it looks like things were under control even before the Minnesota disaster, and now even more emphasis will be put on bridge safety," he said. "When disaster occurs, more attention is paid to the issue. Sometimes it takes a plane crash to focus on airline safety."
Hindi cited a federal highway safety study from 2003 showing that for every bridge repaired and removed from the list of structurally deficient bridges, 2.2 bridges fall onto the list.
"Unless significant capital is given to repair and upkeep, this will be a national problem that will only get worse," Hindi said. "Every year, more bridges require significant maintenance, and it is cheaper to fix a bridge than replace one."
A report issued this week by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials - timed to be released at the one-year anniversary of the Minneapolis bridge collapse - outlined the challenges of rebuilding the country's bridges. The report found that one of every four bridges needs to be modernized or repaired and it could cost $140 billion to immediately make all the needed repairs or upgrades.
A capital construction program for Illinois is currently in limbo, stuck in a battle between the state Legislature and Gov. Rod Blagojevich.
IDOT Secretary Milton Sees responded to the highway association's report in prepared comments:
"IDOT's No. 1 priority is the safety of our bridges and roads," Sees said. "Our bridge inspectors are in the field every day to assure the safety of nearly 8,000 bridges across the state. Passing a capital construction program will help us maintain and improve upon this ranking."
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