NY - 110 Bridges Even Less Safe Than The Champlain Bridge
Douglas Kerr
state as less safe than the Champlain Bridge near Crown Point that
engineers only recently found to be on the verge of collapse.
Read the article at http://www.timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=863953
Honorable Mention
Hmmm...misc.transport.road may get new life after all contrary to what
some may say. Unfortunately, now it looks like it will be about the
latest engineering failure and disaster instead of the latest exciting
new road projects announced or the progress of a long-term road
project.
1999: "Traffic was shifted today off of Route 22 onto the latest
segment of the brand new I-769 in Harmonyville." An excited mtr road
enthusiast drives 70 miles on cheap gas to then supply photos
painstakingly the old-fashioned way on a new spartan web page on
GeoCities with gallery of such new road.
2009: "I-98 traffic was backed up for miles after the Burliss P.
Tartham Bridge collapses into the Bushy River." Photos then posted
quickly and easily on flickr by the state DOT of the grueling scene.
BTW, all headlines and road names were made up.
Douglas Kerr
wrote:
Sad, but true. And until the states can get their financial house in
order, expect more of the same.
Nathan Perry
<0d971637-03e1-4a81...@v30g2000yqm.googlegroups.com>,
Douglas Kerr <doug...@gmail.com> wrote:
> There are 110 bridges across New York state that were ranked by the
> state as less safe than the Champlain Bridge near Crown Point that
> engineers only recently found to be on the verge of collapse.
The above paragraph is patently untrue, according to this quote on the
NYSDOT website:
"NYSDOT defines a deficient bridge as one with a State condition rating
less than 5.0. A deficient condition rating indicates deterioration at
a level that requires corrective maintenance or rehabilitation to
restore the bridge to its fully functional, non-deficient condition. It
does not mean that the bridge is unsafe. "
The article mentions a "safety score" of 3.375. As far as I know, NYSDOT
assigns no such value to its bridges. It does assign "condition
ratings", and for this bridge that value is the same 3.375.
It certainly seems that every time a bridge collapses or, as in this
case, is predicted to collapse, we get into this discussion about the
misconception of condition ratings as equivalent to safety. Now I won't
say that equivalency exists or doesn't exist, only that newspapers
almost invariably make the conclusion that it does, usually without
"showing their work" as your math teacher used to say. Still, what
percentage of failed bridges had ratings that this article would
conclude to be "safe"?