43
Report: Weak bridges span Mahoning Valley
By Karl Henkel
Weak Bridges
Document
Access lists of weak bridges in Mahoning, Trumbull and Columbiana counties.
YOUNGSTOWN
Crews surveyed the Market Street bridge in downtown Youngstown on Wednesday as part of the structure’s annual inspection.
The bridge, formally named the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Bridge, is structurally sound, but the same can’t be said for hundreds of bridges in the Mahoning Valley.
With 18.9 percent of bridges considered “structurally deficient” the Youngstown area has the seventh-highest percentage of deficient bridges in the nation among metropolitan areas of less than 1 million people, according to a new report from Transportation for America, a transportation reform group.
The group says the bridges need substantial repair or replacement.
A bridge is deficient if at least one of three components — the deck, or surface of the bridge; the superstructure, or the deck support; or the substructure, which supports the structure — are rated poor during an inspection.
The Valley has 228 of those bridges. On an average day, 789,241 vehicles will cross a deficient Valley bridge, the group said.
The risks associated with faulty bridges are minimized though, according to county engineers, because bridges often are given weight limits as precautionary measures.
Most Valley bridges, including the Market Street bridge, which opened for traffic in 1983, are not considered deficient.
But some heavy-traffic spans received the label, including the U.S. Route 224 bridge that crosses over Interstate 680 in Boardman. That bridge, built in 1974, services 32,730 cars daily.
Some deemed deficient already are under construction, such as Interstate 80 at state Route 422 in Girard.
It falls under the auspices of the Ohio Department of Transportation District 4, which has about $30 million a year to spend on bridge repairs, said Jack Noble, district bridge engineer. That figure could cover costs for about five to six complete bridge replacements.
Other township or county spans already have been scheduled for reconstruction, such as the Olive Street Bridge, built in 1920, that connects Niles and McDonald in Trumbull County.
That bridge has been closed since 2009, said Trumbull County Engineer Randy Smith, and will be demolished in 2013 and rebuilt at a cost of $6 million.
Eighty percent of the funds will come from the federal government; the other 20 percent will be picked up by the state or the county.
“That’s an important bridge that connects two communities,” Smith said. “So I’m positive it will be successful.”
The Olive Street Bridge is one of 19 bridges in the pipeline for replacement between now and 2017 based on planned funding, Smith said.
But despite municipalities and entities trying to keep up with bridge repairs, the Federal Highway Administration estimates that the backlog of potentially dangerous bridges — approximately 18,239 of 69,223 bridges nationwide — would cost $71 billion to eliminate. The federal allotment for bridge repairs is $5 billion annually.
If a bridge is considered deficient, it doesn’t mean it’s in irreparable condition, and those that are given safe marks aren’t completely safe.
That was the case with the Aug. 1, 2007, Interstate 35 bridge collapse in Minneapolis, which killed 13 and injured 145. It wasn’t technically “deficient.”
Eroding infrastructure is nothing new. The American Society of Civil Engineers gave America’s infrastructure a D grade this year.
That has lawmakers like U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, a Democrat from Avon, on Wednesday pitching ideas to fix the country’s roads.
Brown is lobbying for lawmakers to act on his National Infrastructure Bank Act of 2011, which would provide low-interest loans, loan guarantees and loan forgiveness for projects that are unable to obtain full financing in the private market or from local funding.