When Will the Next Bridge Collapse?

The Minneapolis bridge disaster is no isolated incident but a warning signal: More than 160,000 road bridges in the USA are considered to be in danger of collapse. Highways, tunnels, dams and dykes are in such miserable condition that engineers have long been ringing the alarm — so far in vain.

…The US freeways got the miserable grade “D” from the ASCE. Around 332,000 kilometers of highways cross the US, most of them built in the 1950s. Hundreds of highways are maintained with the help of toll charges. Nevertheless bad road conditions, potholes, cracked asphalt and broken road surfaces cost US drivers a total of $54 billion each year — $275 per motorist — in terms of extra vehicle repairs and operating costs caused by driving on roads in need of repair.


Many drivers miss disasters by a hair’s breadth. After a truck accident in Oakland in California on April 29 in which a fire broke out, a highway overpass melted and concrete slabs weighing tons fell on the roadway underneath. Fortunately the debacle happened in the early hours of the morning and not in the middle of the rush hour, and only one man was seriously injured.

The US government currently spends approximately $60 billion annually on highway repairs. But according to the ASCE’s calculations, that is far too little: It reckons the necessary investments at nearly $100 billion. In addition, the White House recently forecast that the federal Highway Trust Fund — a pool of money used to finance maintenance of the highway system, raised by a federal tax of 18.3 cents per gallon on gasoline — would have a shortfall of around $4 billion by 2009. And that’s a conservative estimate, if you listen to the Democrats.

America’s road tunnels are not in any better condition — even the brand new ones. On July 11, 2006, several 12-ton cement ceiling tiles in the “Big Dig” tunnel under Boston’s downtown, which had opened at the beginning of 2006, fell down, killing one driver. The ceiling collapse was not an absurd accident, as the authorities first portrayed it, but was caused by incompetence. Since then, the National Transportation Safety Board, an independent federal agency responsible for investigating transportation accidents, have found out that the accident was caused by inferior quality building materials, sloppy work on the part of the construction firms, and carelessness on the part of the local highways department, the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority.

The situation is much worse with the approximately 83,000 dams and dykes in the US. The catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina, which two years ago brought down the inadequate dyke system around New Orleans and caused over 1,800 deaths, revealed problems which are not limited to storm-prone Louisiana. According to the ASCE, the number of “unsafe” dams and dykes has increased by a third to over 3,500 country-wide since 1998. Worryingly, “the number of dams identified as unsafe is increasing at a faster rate than those being repaired,” according to the ASCE.

Between 1999 and 2006 alone, 129 dams failed in the USA. Around 1,000 “dam incidents,” which alert engineers to deficiencies that threaten the safety of a dam, were reported on top of that. Rural states such as Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Ohio are in the most danger. The Ka Loko dam on the Hawaiian island of Kauai burst in March 2006, killing seven people. The dam at Lake Cumberland in Kentucky could only be prevented from bursting in January 2007 at the last minute by lowering the water level.

The ASCE’s list of defects continues. The US’s completely overloaded airports get a “D+” grade. The ramshackle drinking water system get the grade “D-” with the ASCE writing that “America faces a shortfall of $11 billion annually to replace aging facilities and comply with safe drinking water regulations.” The electric power grid, which is “in urgent need of modernization,” likewise gets a “D.”

Spiegel