Unstable Bridges, Underfunded Facilities
After the catastrophe in Minneapolis, decrepit bridges are getting a closer look and coming up short, reports CBS News correspondent Nancy Cordes.
From California to Connecticut on Friday, inspectors could be seen hanging off bridges, floating below them, and peering at them with binoculars.
"You never know when you're gonna find a crack," one inspector says.
What they're seeing are spans that appear to be held together by little more than hope—like one propped up by two by fours in New Jersey. Inspectors also found rusted metal in Maryland and decaying concrete in California.
Coming under the greatest scrutiny are the 750 bridges in the U.S. that are similar in design to the one that collapsed. A third of those steel deck-truss bridges are rated structurally deficient—just like the Minneapolis bridge was before its structure failed.
"It's like when you bend a paper clip," Ohio structural engineer Chuck Cvitkovich says. "If you keep bending that paper clip, eventually it's going to break."
Today and every day, the most sophisticated piece of equipment that's typically used to inspect bridges is the naked eye.
"I clean the weld with a brush and wipe the dirt off to make a visual inspection to make sure there's not a crack," and inspector in Arkansas said.
But visual inspections don't mean much if they're wrong. The Federal Highway Administration estimates that 56 percent of the time, bridges are rated as better or worse than they actually are.
There is new technology that uses electric currents to look for cracks inside metal beams—kind of like an EKG for a bridge. Only a couple of states use it.
At Los Alamos National Laboratories in New Mexico, they've developed a tiny helicopter that could send signals to and get readings from sensors embedded in bridges. But it's not ready, and it's expensive.
Nick Roper is the chief bridge engineer for Northern Virginia, where 30 bridges have been deemed structurally deficient.
"If you had enough funding, what would you do that you can't do now?" Cordes asks.
"I would replace every deficient bridge that's in my district," Roper says.
And that's the real dilemma facing transportation officials from coast to coast. Even if all those inspections do uncover structural problems, where will the money come to fix them?
As CBS News correspondent Sharyl Attkisson reports, funding the nation's infrastructure is all a matter of priorities.
Out of the $2.7 trillion dollar federal budget, it's estimated only around $50 billion dollars a year goes for infrastructure – just a tiny slice of the pie. Experts say what's needed is $210 billion dollars a year for five years just for upkeep.
And the need is felt in all 50 states.
Coast-to-coast there have been sewage leaks, killer chunks of falling concrete, broken pipes in the Midwest, and contaminated water in Washington D.C. New Jersey loses an astonishing 20 million gallons of drinking water a day from leaky pipes.
But when it comes to spending federal dollars, sometimes priorities seem out of whack.
In Alaska, a third of the bridges are awaiting repair. But Alaska's members of Congress wanted to put $450 million toward pet projects for two new bridges that would only serve a combined population of about a hundred.
In Colorado, the highways are corroded and rusting. But the state's members of Congress still saw fit to put a half million dollars toward a future wildlife overpass. That's right, a bridge for wild animals to cross the highway.
But Congress only funds about 25 percent of the nation's infrastructure. States and local governments pick up the rest of the tab and they're cash-starved too.
Congressman Jim Oberstar from Minnesota heads the House Transportation Committee and is Congress' leading authority on infrastructure.
"We need to do far better and we all know that," Oberstar says.
He says both Congress and the White House have traditionally had trouble making the tough decision to collect and spend more tax dollars on infrastructure.
"We have to make those investments and they don't come like manna from the sky. You have to pay for it. And you either pay now or pay a whole lot later," he says.
The Minnesota bridge collapse may be the catalyst that pushes Congress to make better plans and a bigger investment in the upkeep of the critical facilities that keep the nation running.
