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INTERSTATE HIGHWAY SYSTEM -- Collapse Spotlights Weaknesses in U.S. Infrastructure |
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/02/AR200708020=
2410.html?hpid=3Dtopnews
INTERSTATE HIGHWAY SYSTEM
Collapse Spotlights Weaknesses in U.S. Infrastructure
By Nick Miroff
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, August 3, 2007; Page A08
The bridge that lies crumpled in the Mississippi River is the latest
link to fail in a national highway system rapidly deteriorating under
the strain of ever-increasing traffic volume and inadequate upkeep,
transportation experts said yesterday.
Once the sturdy pride of post-war America, the federal interstate
system is now a vast network of aging roads and bridges, including
many -- such as the span that collapsed in Minneapolis -- that
engineers consider deficient or obsolete.
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neighborhoods captured in photos, through the Washington Post
Community Guides.
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Despite record spending on highways, experts and engineers said
federal funds aren't enough to save the interstate system's half-
century old bridges and 47,000 miles of highway from further decay, as
a network designed to connect the nation teeters under a crush of
commuter traffic.
"We're falling further and further behind," said Robert Poole,
director of transportation studies at Reason Foundation and an adviser
to the Federal Highway Administration. "We're prospering as a nation,
driving more as commuters and shipping more goods, and that's pounding
the highways and wearing them out."
According to a 2005 Highway Administration report, more than 75,000 of
the nation's roughly 600,000 bridges -- 13.1 percent -- were rated
"structurally deficient," meaning some components of the bridges'
decks or support structures were rated poor or worse. While not
necessarily unsafe, the structurally deficient designation often
requires speed and weight restrictions to lessen the risk of collapse.
Concerns about bridge reliability pushed the state of the country's
infrastructure into the political arena yesterday, as Senate Majority
Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) called the Minneapolis bridge collapse a
"wake-up call."
"We have all over the country crumbling infrastructure -- highways,
bridges, dams -- and we really need to take a hard look at this," Reid
said in a television interview.
Congress approved a six-year, $286 billion transportation funding
package in 2005 that boosted highway and mass transit projects. But
the government will need to spend $188 billion in the next 20 years
just to fix the nation's flawed bridges, according to a 2005 study by
the American Society of Civil Engineers.
Bridges in the Washington region are, on average, in better condition
than elsewhere in the country, although hundreds of area spans are in
substandard shape. Of the 245 bridges in the District, 9 percent were
graded structurally deficient in the Highway Administration survey,
along with 9 percent of Virginia bridges and 8 percent of Maryland
bridges.
Engineers on the $2.4 billion Woodrow Wilson Bridge Project, one of
several bridge projects underway in the region, said the new bridge is
designed to avert the kind of catastrophe that occurred in
Minneapolis.
"A majority of the interstate bridges in this country are [at the end
of] service life," said Ronaldo T. "Nick" Nicholson, the Virginia
Department of Transportation's manager for the Woodrow Wilson Bridge
project. "In Minnesota, they were trying to extend the life rather
than replace it."
Though engineers have not yet determined why the Minneapolis bridge
failed, bridge experts said its collapse was not necessarily the
result of a physical breakdown. Of the 1,502 recorded bridge failures
between 1966 and 2005, almost 60 percent were caused by soil erosion
around the underwater bridge supports, according to Jean-Louis Briaud,
a civil engineer with the Texas Transportation Institute.
"It's the number one killer of bridges," he said. "If you create a
hole around the bridge support, then the foundation cannot carry the
load of the deck."
Vigilant inspections can prevent failures, and the Minnesota collapse
was particularly shocking to those who say safety has been improving.
Want to learn more about your community? Experience events from our
neighborhoods captured in photos, through the Washington Post
Community Guides.
View this week's photos =C2=BB
Archive: Previous weeks =C2=BB
Map Your Community
Use Local Explorer to learn about Washington, D.C., Maryland and
Virginia communities.
Search for:
Choose one... Places in the Area - Grocery & Drug Stores - Hospitals
- Libraries - Movie Theaters - Museums - Places of Worship - Post
Offices - Restaurants & Bars Recent Home Sales Schools Crime
Zip Code:
=C2=BB WHAT IS LOCAL EXPLORER?
Save & Share Article What's This?
DiggGoogle
del.icio.usYahoo!
RedditFacebook
"By and large, things are positive, and states have been spending more
on bridges and making progress," said Alan E. Pisarski, author of
"Commuting in America," who noted that the number of structurally
deficient bridges in the country has declined in the past decade. "But
there are still a lot of them that are structurally deficient."
Nevertheless, the overall national infrastructure is stuck in a "death
spiral," as states repeatedly fail to maintain the status quo
condition of their transportation networks, Pisarski said. Maintenance
standards slip further as the money is spread thin.
Diminishing tax revenue and surging costs have put a double squeeze on
state transportation departments, transportation experts said. While
federal gas tax rates have remained at 18.4 cents a gallon since 1993,
construction costs have been increasing 20 percent a year in some
areas. The price of steel, oil and concrete are all up, partly driven
by demand for raw materials in China, where the government is busy
laying out a national highway system of its own.
"We're going to run out of capacity pretty quick, and that is going to
put a grinding halt on productivity, profitability and our way of
life," said Janet Kavinoky, director of transportation infrastructure
at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Last year marked the 50th anniversary of the Interstate Highway
System, a legacy of President Dwight D. Eisenhower and his grand
vision for a road system that would shrink the continent and "meet the
demands of catastrophe or defense, should an atomic war come."
The missiles never came, but the cars did. State transportation
departments, which took control of the interstate system in exchange
for federal funds, are confronted with an even costlier mission:
satisfying commuter demand for lane-widening projects in urban areas
where land is most expensive.
One result, said the Reason Foundation's Poole, is that states are
turning to the private sector to maintain existing roads and build the
next generation of highways, a change encouraged by the Bush
administration.
Jerome F. Hajjar, professor of structural engineering at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said the American Society
of Civil Engineers has been warning for years that the nation needs to
devote more attention to its aging bridges.
"Each bridge is different, and each bridge needs to stand up," he
said. "Collapsing is not an option."
Staff writers Brigid Schulte and Amy Goldstein contributed to this
report.
=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=
=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D
http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_6528661
On the road home, a nightly routine turns into horror
By RYAN FOLEY Associated Press Writer
TwinCities.com-Pioneer Press
Article Launched:08/02/2007 05:29:38 PM PDT
MINNEAPOLIS=E2=80=94Four minutes after the Interstate 35W bridge collapsed,
police Sgt. Ed Nelson was among those rushing into the dust-filled
scene of twisted metal, crushed cars and chunks of concrete turned up
like gravestones.
The 55-year-old jumped over debris and crawled across a foot-wide
twisted beam to get to some dazed survivors on a piece of interstate
dumped into the Mississippi River. He and two other officers helped
them onto rescue boats.
"I just explained to them that they had fallen. they seemed somewhat
amazed by that," Nelson said Thursday. "We made sure everybody was off
that span and we got on the last boat."
Nelson wouldn't speak of the dead. Police Chief Tim Dolan did.
First responders Wednesday had to do more than rescue the living and
recover the dead, he said: At times the only thing they could do for
people trapped under wreckage was to listen.
"There are some unbelievable testimonials and stories involving a
number of those people. People who were pinned or partly crushed told
emergency workers to say 'hello' or say 'goodbye' to their loved
ones," Dolan said.
The eight-lane interstate, Minnesota's busiest with an average of
141,000 vehicles a day, collapsed during evening rush hour, sending
dozens of cars plummeting. Four people were confirmed dead and 79 were
injured, but the death toll was expected to rise and up to 30 people
remained missing.
The cause remained unclear. The bridge had been declared "structurally
deficient" in 1990, a federal designation some 77,000 bridges share,
but it had been inspected regularly and state officials said they had
seen nothing to indicate that it was in danger of collapsing.
Minutes after the collapse, Dr. John Hick found a hellish scene at the
south side of the bridge. But the emergency room physician didn't see
the worst of it until he reached the north side 30 minutes later,
after helping to set up a triage point.
The 64-foot-high span is not as high above the riverbank on the south
side, so those injuries were less serious. On the other bank, there
was little he could do.
"If you drop 60 feet, that's about the same thing as hitting a brick
wall," said Hick, assistant medical director for emergency medical
services at the Hennepin County Medical Center. "At the time that I
got to the north side, the only people who were still in their
vehicles were the people who had died."
There was a different feeling of helplessness at the site of the
collapse Thursday, well after the emergency crews switched from a
rescue operation to one of recovering the dead.
Submerged cars sat in the Mississippi, guaranteeing the death toll
will rise above the official figure of four. The danger of
unpredictable currents kept dive crews from reaching them.
But amid all the death were untold scores of people amazed to have
survived the fall.
"The first vehicle we came up on was completely submerged and
crushed," Nelson said. "I asked a gentleman if he saw anybody get out
of that vehicle. He looked at me and said, 'That was me.'"
Melissa Hughes, a warehouse manager, remembers the view from the
bridge tumbling around her.
"All of a sudden, things were up in the air. Things weren't on the
ground anymore," she said. "I swear I saw a construction worker in mid-
air. Then I had that free-falling feeling."
As suddenly as it plunged, her car had stopped. Then she heard a huge
crash as her back window exploded. Later, looking over the scene, she
realized the noise had come from a black pickup truck that had flipped
and fallen on top of her car.
"I heard people yelling. There was one person standing outside the
vehicle just screaming in pain, grabbing his back and just falling to
his knees."
Jay Reeves, driving home from his office at the American Red Cross,
saw the bridge collapse while on a parkway that passes under it. As he
pulled onto the shoulder and opened his car door, the first thing he
heard was children's voices, screaming from inside a bus, its back-end
poking toward the sky.
"Screaming kids are good," Reeves said. "That means they're alive and
full of a lot of energy. As a paramedic, that's the best thing, I'll
tell you. If it's quiet, that means I've got a busload of children who
can't help themselves."
"My only priority was to get those people off the bridge," he said.
The bridge was groaning, and he was afraid it would collapse further.
People climbed up on the deck and helped the kids out of the bus.
"Someone handed a kid down to me," Reeves said.
Aron Dahlgren, a 23-year-old University of Minnesota graduate student,
lay trapped inside his 2000 GMC Sierra, the vehicle pointed nose down,
up against another car.
He felt something cold and wet. It felt like blood. Was he alive?
Then his truck rolled forward. He realized the cool liquid was the
iced tea he'd been carrying. He shook off the stupor and climbed
toward safety.
"A lot of it's a blur," he said. "I just pulled myself out. I don't
know if I opened the door. I pulled myself through probably through
the window. I remember my feet getting tangled in the seat belt."
He had cuts on his palms and knees from pulling himself out. He didn't
need stitches, but doctors at the emergency room removed small pieces
of glass from one of his fingers.
"The first thing I heard was a person in the car adjacent to me
screaming. Other than that, it was quiet. The person was screaming. He
said, 'I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm getting out of here.' He looked hurt,
but he was moving. We were all kind of together and just took off. It
was very quiet, and very eerie. I guess the sirens started 20 seconds
or so after that. And then all hell broke loose. Before that, it was
just quiet."
"The image that's stuck in my head is of the bridge collapsing,"
Dahlgren said. "The signs just coming down. You could feel a rumble,
and the next thing you know you're free-falling. It happened so fast
you don't even think about it."
It was fast, but that was long enough for the thought to cross his
mind: A few seconds either way, and he would not be alive.
=E2=80=94=E2=80=94=E2=80=94
EDITOR'S NOTE=E2=80=94AP writers Adam Geller, Patrick Condon, Joshua Freed,
Gregg Aamot and Mark Carlson in Minneapolis, Matt Crenson and Deborah
Hastings in New York and Justin Pope in Boston contributed to this
report.
=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D
.
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| Title: Re: INTERSTATE HIGHWAY SYSTEM -- Collapse Spotlights Weaknesses in U.S. Infrastructure |
02 Aug 2007 11:46:58 PM |
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/02/AR200...
INTERSTATE HIGHWAY SYSTEM
Collapse Spotlights Weaknesses in U.S. Infrastructure
By Nick Miroff
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, August 3, 2007; Page A08
The bridge that lies crumpled in the Mississippi River is the latest
link to fail in a national highway system rapidly deteriorating under
the strain of ever-increasing traffic volume and inadequate upkeep,
transportation experts said yesterday.
Once the sturdy pride of post-war America, the federal interstate
system is now a vast network of aging roads and bridges, including
many -- such as the span that collapsed in Minneapolis -- that
engineers consider deficient or obsolete.
Despite record spending on highways, experts and engineers said
federal funds aren't enough to save the interstate system's half-
century old bridges and 47,000 miles of highway from further decay,
as
a network designed to connect the nation teeters under a crush of
commuter traffic.
"We're falling further and further behind," said Robert Poole,
director of transportation studies at Reason Foundation and an
adviser
to the Federal Highway Administration. "We're prospering as a nation,
driving more as commuters and shipping more goods, and that's
pounding
the highways and wearing them out."
According to a 2005 Highway Administration report, more than 75,000
of
the nation's roughly 600,000 bridges -- 13.1 percent -- were rated
"structurally deficient," meaning some components of the bridges'
decks or support structures were rated poor or worse. While not
necessarily unsafe, the structurally deficient designation often
requires speed and weight restrictions to lessen the risk of
collapse.
Concerns about bridge reliability pushed the state of the country's
infrastructure into the political arena yesterday, as Senate Majority
Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) called the Minneapolis bridge collapse
a
"wake-up call."
"We have all over the country crumbling infrastructure -- highways,
bridges, dams -- and we really need to take a hard look at this,"
Reid
said in a television interview.
Congress approved a six-year, $286 billion transportation funding
package in 2005 that boosted highway and mass transit projects. But
the government will need to spend $188 billion in the next 20 years
just to fix the nation's flawed bridges, according to a 2005 study by
the American Society of Civil Engineers.
Bridges in the Washington region are, on average, in better condition
than elsewhere in the country, although hundreds of area spans are in
substandard shape. Of the 245 bridges in the District, 9 percent were
graded structurally deficient in the Highway Administration survey,
along with 9 percent of Virginia bridges and 8 percent of Maryland
bridges.
Engineers on the $2.4 billion Woodrow Wilson Bridge Project, one of
several bridge projects underway in the region, said the new bridge
is
designed to avert the kind of catastrophe that occurred in
Minneapolis.
"A majority of the interstate bridges in this country are [at the end
of] service life," said Ronaldo T. "Nick" Nicholson, the Virginia
Department of Transportation's manager for the Woodrow Wilson Bridge
project. "In Minnesota, they were trying to extend the life rather
than replace it."
Though engineers have not yet determined why the Minneapolis bridge
failed, bridge experts said its collapse was not necessarily the
result of a physical breakdown. Of the 1,502 recorded bridge failures
between 1966 and 2005, almost 60 percent were caused by soil erosion
around the underwater bridge supports, according to Jean-Louis
Briaud,
a civil engineer with the Texas Transportation Institute.
"It's the number one killer of bridges," he said. "If you create a
hole around the bridge support, then the foundation cannot carry the
load of the deck."
Vigilant inspections can prevent failures, and the Minnesota collapse
was particularly shocking to those who say safety has been improving.
Want to learn more about your community? Experience events from our
neighborhoods captured in photos, through the Washington Post
Community Guides.
"By and large, things are positive, and states have been spending
more
on bridges and making progress," said Alan E. Pisarski, author of
"Commuting in America," who noted that the number of structurally
deficient bridges in the country has declined in the past decade.
"But
there are still a lot of them that are structurally deficient."
Nevertheless, the overall national infrastructure is stuck in a
"death
spiral," as states repeatedly fail to maintain the status quo
condition of their transportation networks, Pisarski said.
Maintenance
standards slip further as the money is spread thin.
Diminishing tax revenue and surging costs have put a double squeeze
on
state transportation departments, transportation experts said. While
federal gas tax rates have remained at 18.4 cents a gallon since
1993,
construction costs have been increasing 20 percent a year in some
areas. The price of steel, oil and concrete are all up, partly driven
by demand for raw materials in China, where the government is busy
laying out a national highway system of its own.
"We're going to run out of capacity pretty quick, and that is going
to
put a grinding halt on productivity, profitability and our way of
life," said Janet Kavinoky, director of transportation infrastructure
at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Last year marked the 50th anniversary of the Interstate Highway
System, a legacy of President Dwight D. Eisenhower and his grand
vision for a road system that would shrink the continent and "meet
the
demands of catastrophe or defense, should an atomic war come."
The missiles never came, but the cars did. State transportation
departments, which took control of the interstate system in exchange
for federal funds, are confronted with an even costlier mission:
satisfying commuter demand for lane-widening projects in urban areas
where land is most expensive.
One result, said the Reason Foundation's Poole, is that states are
turning to the private sector to maintain existing roads and build
the
next generation of highways, a change encouraged by the Bush
administration.
Jerome F. Hajjar, professor of structural engineering at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said the American Society
of Civil Engineers has been warning for years that the nation needs
to
devote more attention to its aging bridges.
"Each bridge is different, and each bridge needs to stand up," he
said. "Collapsing is not an option."
Staff writers Brigid Schulte and Amy Goldstein contributed to this
report.
================================
http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_6528661
On the road home, a nightly routine turns into horror
By RYAN FOLEY Associated Press Writer
TwinCities.com-Pioneer Press
Article Launched:08/02/2007 05:29:38 PM PDT
MINNEAPOLIS-Four minutes after the Interstate 35W bridge collapsed,
police Sgt. Ed Nelson was among those rushing into the dust-filled
scene of twisted metal, crushed cars and chunks of concrete turned up
like gravestones.
The 55-year-old jumped over debris and crawled across a foot-wide
twisted beam to get to some dazed survivors on a piece of interstate
dumped into the Mississippi River. He and two other officers helped
them onto rescue boats.
"I just explained to them that they had fallen. they seemed somewhat
amazed by that," Nelson said Thursday. "We made sure everybody was
off
that span and we got on the last boat."
Nelson wouldn't speak of the dead. Police Chief Tim Dolan did.
First responders Wednesday had to do more than rescue the living and
recover the dead, he said: At times the only thing they could do for
people trapped under wreckage was to listen.
"There are some unbelievable testimonials and stories involving a
number of those people. People who were pinned or partly crushed told
emergency workers to say 'hello' or say 'goodbye' to their loved
ones," Dolan said.
The eight-lane interstate, Minnesota's busiest with an average of
141,000 vehicles a day, collapsed during evening rush hour, sending
dozens of cars plummeting. Four people were confirmed dead and 79
were
injured, but the death toll was expected to rise and up to 30 people
remained missing.
The cause remained unclear. The bridge had been declared
"structurally
deficient" in 1990, a federal designation some 77,000 bridges share,
but it had been inspected regularly and state officials said they had
seen nothing to indicate that it was in danger of collapsing.
Minutes after the collapse, Dr. John Hick found a hellish scene at
the
south side of the bridge. But the emergency room physician didn't see
the worst of it until he reached the north side 30 minutes later,
after helping to set up a triage point.
The 64-foot-high span is not as high above the riverbank on the south
side, so those injuries were less serious. On the other bank, there
was little he could do.
"If you drop 60 feet, that's about the same thing as hitting a brick
wall," said Hick, assistant medical director for emergency medical
services at the Hennepin County Medical Center. "At the time that I
got to the north side, the only people who were still in their
vehicles were the people who had died."
There was a different feeling of helplessness at the site of the
collapse Thursday, well after the emergency crews switched from a
rescue operation to one of recovering the dead.
Submerged cars sat in the Mississippi, guaranteeing the death toll
will rise above the official figure of four. The danger of
unpredictable currents kept dive crews from reaching them.
But amid all the death were untold scores of people amazed to have
survived the fall.
"The first vehicle we came up on was completely submerged and
crushed," Nelson said. "I asked a gentleman if he saw anybody get out
of that vehicle. He looked at me and said, 'That was me.'"
Melissa Hughes, a warehouse manager, remembers the view from the
bridge tumbling around her.
"All of a sudden, things were up in the air. Things weren't on the
ground anymore," she said. "I swear I saw a construction worker in
mid-
air. Then I had that free-falling feeling."
As suddenly as it plunged, her car had stopped. Then she heard a huge
crash as her back window exploded. Later, looking over the scene, she
realized the noise had come from a black pickup truck that had
flipped
and fallen on top of her car.
"I heard people yelling. There was one person standing outside the
vehicle just screaming in pain, grabbing his back and just falling to
his knees."
Jay Reeves, driving home from his office at the American Red Cross,
saw the bridge collapse while on a parkway that passes under it. As
he
pulled onto the shoulder and opened his car door, the first thing he
heard was children's voices, screaming from inside a bus, its back-
end
poking toward the sky.
"Screaming kids are good," Reeves said. "That means they're alive and
full of a lot of energy. As a paramedic, that's the best thing, I'll
tell you. If it's quiet, that means I've got a busload of children
who
can't help themselves."
"My only priority was to get those people off the bridge," he said.
The bridge was groaning, and he was afraid it would collapse further.
People climbed up on the deck and helped the kids out of the bus.
"Someone handed a kid down to me," Reeves said.
Aron Dahlgren, a 23-year-old University of Minnesota graduate
student,
lay trapped inside his 2000 GMC Sierra, the vehicle pointed nose
down,
up against another car.
He felt something cold and wet. It felt like blood. Was he alive?
Then his truck rolled forward. He realized the cool liquid was the
iced tea he'd been carrying. He shook off the stupor and climbed
toward safety.
"A lot of it's a blur," he said. "I just pulled myself out. I don't
know if I opened the door. I pulled myself through probably through
the window. I remember my feet getting tangled in the seat belt."
He had cuts on his palms and knees from pulling himself out. He
didn't
need stitches, but doctors at the emergency room removed small pieces
of glass from one of his fingers.
"The first thing I heard was a person in the car adjacent to me
screaming. Other than that, it was quiet. The person was screaming.
He
said, 'I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm getting out of here.' He looked hurt,
but he was moving. We were all kind of together and just took off. It
was very quiet, and very eerie. I guess the sirens started 20 seconds
or so after that. And then all hell broke loose. Before that, it was
just quiet."
"The image that's stuck in my head is of the bridge collapsing,"
Dahlgren said. "The signs just coming down. You could feel a rumble,
and the next thing you know you're free-falling. It happened so fast
you don't even think about it."
It was fast, but that was long enough for the thought to cross his
mind: A few seconds either way, and he would not be alive.
---
EDITOR'S NOTE-AP writers Adam Geller, Patrick Condon, Joshua Freed,
Gregg Aamot and Mark Carlson in Minneapolis, Matt Crenson and Deborah
Hastings in New York and Justin Pope in Boston contributed to this
report.
=========================
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