MassDOT tracking Baltimore bridge probe
About 12% of Mass. bridges considered ‘structurally deficient,’ highway official says
A top Massachusetts transportation official in charge of overseeing the state’s bridges said he is closely following a federal investigation into the collapse of a Baltimore bridge for any findings that could be applicable to structures in the Bay State.
National Transportation Safety Board investigators are looking at the design of the Francis Scott Key Bridge and whether it could have been built with better protections after a massive container ship struck a supporting column nearly three weeks ago, sending the structure crashing down into the Patapsco River and killing six construction workers.
Massachusetts Highway Administrator Jonathan Gulliver said the state’s Department of Transportation “will enact whatever” comes out of the Baltimore probe that is relevant to Massachusetts.
He said it would not be the first time officials here have taken cues from a bridge collapse in another state.
Gulliver pointed to the 2007 collapse of an interstate bridge in Minneapolis that spanned the Mississippi River and left 13 people dead, an incident that he said “was exacerbated by construction that was ongoing on the bridge.”
“We now take a great deal of care when we do our bridge construction to ensure that the weight of the bridge construction activity that’s going on is still going to be safe for the load carrying capacity of the bridge,” Gulliver said during a Tuesday meeting. “That was something that came directly out of that bridge.”
Former Gov. Deval Patrick also launched the Accelerated Bridge Program in the wake of the Minneapolis bridge collapse, an initiative in Massachusetts that sought to reduce the number of structurally deficient bridges.
Years later, Gulliver said about 12% of the more than 5,000 bridges officials inspect in Massachusetts every two years are considered structurally deficient, which the state defines as being at “the end of their useful life and in need of replacement or major rehabilitation.”
“Our goal is to get to 10%. We’d obviously love to be lower than that but we do have a very old bridge inventory, about 15 years older on average than the rest of the United States,” Gulliver told the MassDOT Board of Directors.
MassDOT’s Highway Division inspects 3,493 stateowned and 1,689 municipally-owned bridges every two years. Over half of all bridges in Massachusetts carry traffic over waterways, with 85 considered to span “navigable channels.”
“Massachusetts has a robust process for incoming and outgoing vessels entering our ports, which includes docking pilots as well as tugboats when necessary. We also do not have shipping channels the same size or depth as the Port of Baltimore,” a presentation to the MassDOT Board of Directors said.
Crews are still in the process of cleaning up the wreckage of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore and have turned to the largest crane on the Eastern Seaboard to move collapsed portions of the structure to a nearby salvage yard.
The FBI opened a criminal investigation into the bridge collapse, with agents focused on the events leading up to the incident and whether federal laws were followed.
The collapse in Baltimore, a major port city on the East Coast, immediately sparked questions in Massachusetts about the safety of local bridges, including the Tobin Bridge, which carries traffic over the Mystic River.
Shortly after the incident, Gov. Maura Healey said local bridges were “up to date” as Gulliver told residents that Massachusetts has a “very safe system.”
Healey also convened a meeting with the Coast Guard, MassDOT, Massachusetts Port Authority, and the Massachusetts Maritime and Boston Harbor Pilots Association to address safety issues.
Gulliver said the one bridge that stood out during that meeting and “continues to stand out” is the Tobin Bridge, which he said has the most maritime traffic that passes underneath. But the number of ships that flow below the structure is “much, much smaller” than a few years ago, he said.
“They get about four or five of those LNG tankers per year now. That number has gone steadily down over the last decade and we expect it to continue to go down as some of those gas storage tanks in Everett are decommissioned in this coming year,” Gulliver said Tuesday.
The piers of the Tobin are outside of navigation channels that a large cargo ship would be escorted through and in shallow waters of the Mystic River, Gulliver said.
“If it were to drift off and head towards one of those piers, it would run aground before actually striking one. And so we’re, again, very confident of the safety of the Tobin and other bridges against something similar. The majority of our bridges have pier protection around them, which helps deflect an issue like you saw (happen) with the Key Bridge,” he said.
Materials from the Associated Press were used in this report.