I- 40 collapse

Crashes on inland waterways — Just four days after the Baltimore bridge collapse, a barge that drifted off course on the Arkansas River rammed into a highway bridge near Sallisaw, Okla.

The bridge survived, thanks in part to a more robust pier design that a bridge engineer said made the structure capable of handling a collision. Just up the river in 2002, freight barges struck a pier supporting Interstate 40, knocking a section into the river and killing 14 people.

Although inland routes such as the Arkansas River, the Missouri River and themississippi River do not get the larger container ships seen at coastal ports, they regularly carry barges large enough to take out a bridge.

Many of the bridges on these large inland waterways do not have protection systems, inspectors have found, including the Sherman Minton Bridge that connects Indiana and Kentucky, the Memphis- Arkansas Bridge in Tennessee, and therobert C. Byrd Bridge linkingwest Virginia and Ohio. And the risks associated with large container vessels also aremoving into new areas of the country, as smaller coastal ports take steps to accommodate them.

In Louisiana, large cargo vessels now make their way up the Mississippi River, passing under two bridges that have been found during inspections to have flawed protection systems: the Veterans Memorial Bridge near Gramercy and the Sunshine Bridge a little farther upriver in St. James Parish.

In New York, the Mid- Hudson Bridge near Poughkeepsie now sees a small but steady stream of large ships passing under its span. Johnlipscomb, a patrol boat captain and a vice president of Riverkeeper, an environmental group, recalled a 2012 incident in which a 600- foot- long oil tanker ran aground near the Port of Albany.

“Accidents happen here at home, and in light of the Baltimore accident, we should be revisiting our existing bridge sand determining whether they are safe ,” he said. “A damaged bridge has enormous consequences.”