Don’t ask me when or where it began, but I’ve found in the last decade or so that I’ve developed a bit of “gephyrophobia.” That’s the formal term for “fear of driving across bridges.” And I must say the report released yesterday by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) about last summer’s collapse of the I-35 bridge in Minneapolis hasn’t done anything to ease my fears.
You probably have heard the story already. Apparently the steel plates which connected the support girders of the bridge were too thin. Evidence shows that 16 of them cracked, the report says.
All that would be bad enough. But the REALLY bad news is buried in that story here:
“The board’s finding, which suggests that the 40-year-old bridge was structurally unsound from its debut, could alter national debate over maintaining the transportation infrastructure.”
And here:
“Experts had warned for years that the I-35W bridge needed expensive repairs. In 1990, a federal inspection declared the bridge “deficient,” noting a history of fractures along the plates that hold together its structural arches.
“After opening to traffic in 1967, the I-35W bridge — like many others — was modified. Such modifications, which included thickening the driving deck, probably added strain to the bridge’s weaker spots. And over the decades, traffic increased on the downtown bridge.”
So what we have here is a bunch of engineers who got the numbers wrong and should have said something like, “Oops!, and recomputed the figures to get the bridge right before it was built. Then, we have various officials who were warned about a decade ago of problems with the bridge — but were unwilling or unable to do anything about it.
Maybe it really is just me — but it isn’t great comfort to know that many bridges were built the same way, and that they, too, might contain deficient or flimsy steel plating. Is that gephyrophobia kicking in for you now, too, or is it just me??
Technorati Tags: bridge collapse report, gephyrophobia, fear of driving over bridges, just a guy who reads the papers
This is frightening in this day and age.
I’ve always had a bit of a fear of driving over bridges. Now that I live in Florida it’s kind of hard to avoid them though. So I drive on the lane farthest from the water and pray…a lot.