{"id":36072,"date":"2013-05-25T05:39:46","date_gmt":"2013-05-25T04:39:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/the-skagit-river-bridge-collapse-another-example-of-decaying-infrastructure\/36072\/"},"modified":"2013-05-25T05:39:46","modified_gmt":"2013-05-25T04:39:46","slug":"the-skagit-river-bridge-collapse-another-example-of-decaying-infrastructure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/the-skagit-river-bridge-collapse-another-example-of-decaying-infrastructure\/","title":{"rendered":"The Skagit River Bridge collapse: Another example of decaying infrastructure"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

\u00a0<\/h3>\n

\n By
\n Christine Schofelt
\n
25 May 2013
\n <\/h5>\n

The four-lane north section of Skagit River Bridge, which is part of I-5 north of Seattle, Washington, collapsed at about 7 p.m. on Thursday evening after its girders were reportedly hit by a truck carrying oversize heavy equipment. According to the Washington Department of Transportation, there were no signs leading up to the much-traveled bridge indicating a maximum height for trucks or cargo. There were no reported deaths, though three cars fell into the Skagit River. <\/p>\n

The truss bridge, which had a 57.4 (out of 100) Sufficiency Rating by the National Bridge Inventory (NBI) in its 2010 inspection, served an average of 71,000 vehicles per day and is on the main route between Seattle, Washington and Canada. The NBI\u2019s structural evaluation appraisal was given as 5, or \u201cSomewhat better than minimum adequacy to tolerate being left in place as is.\u201d<\/p>\n

According to the 2013 Report Card for Washington\u2019s Infrastructure<\/a>, released on Tuesday by the Seattle Section of American Society of Civil Engineers, of the 7,743 bridges in the state of Washington, 391 (5 percent) are \u201cstructurally deficient,\u201d with 36 percent being over 50 years old, and 20 percent of the state\u2019s bridges being \u201cclassified as functionally obsolete because they either cannot meet current traffic demands or do not meet current design standards.\u201d <\/p>\n

The Skagit River Bridge was not judged \u201cstructurally deficient,\u201d which indicates a need for repair or replacement, but \u201cfunctionally obsolete.\u201d Built in 1955, prior to the Interstate 5 route, as part of the old Highway 99, the bridge was not built to interstate standards, but rather was grandfathered in.<\/p>\n

The report predicts that in the next 20 years, another third of Washington\u2019s bridges will \u201cexceed their design life,\u201d gave bridges an overall rating of C- (defined as \u201cMediocre; Needs Attention\u201d), and roads a D (\u201cPoor; At Risk\u201d), citing a drop in funding even as aging infrastructure hits a critical point.<\/p>\n

Despite all this, Washington has the sixth- lowest<\/em> percentage of structurally deficient bridges in the US, with \u201conly\u201d 2,861,030 daily trips across bridges considered deficient\u2013the number-one state for bridge hazards is Pennsylvania, with 22,773,880 such trips, according to Transportation for America. According to the ASCE\u2019s 2013 Report Card on America\u2019s Infrastructure<\/a>, \u201cApproximately 210 million trips are taken daily across deficient bridges in the nation\u2019s 102 largest metropolitan regions.\u201d<\/p>\n

Washington Governor Jay Inslee estimated the cost to repair the Skagit River Bridge at $15 million. US Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood told members of Washington\u2019s congressional delegation on Friday morning that there are emergency funds available, and authorized an initial $1 million. It is not yet clear how much will be available in emergency funds, nor from where the remaining money will come in the cash-strapped state.<\/p>\n

Interstate 5 runs from Canada, through or near most major west coast US cities, and south into Mexico. It serves as a major thoroughfare for travelers and trucking. As Skagit River Bridge acts as a major link between Canada and the US, and as a much-used route for commuters in the area\u2013where Boeing has major operations\u2013repairs are expected to take less time than the thirteen months of the collapsed Interstate 35W highway bridge in Minnesota. In the mean time, traffic is being thrown onto alternate routes, with local commutes that once averaged half an hour now hitting 70 minutes. <\/p>\n

The area\u2019s roads apart from the highway are not designed for such heavy traffic, to say nothing of major truck commerce, and the smaller bridges over the Skagit River will undergo additional strain. One of the alternate routes recommended by Washington State Department of Transportation (crossing the north fork of the Skagit River on Best Road) includes a bridge already noted as \u201cstructurally deficient,\u201d with its last inspection being in August of 2010 when its substructure was given a rating of 4. The WSDOT\u2019s recommended alternate route to Canada, or for those who can bypass Mount Vernon along SR 9, likewise crosses a \u201cstructurally deficient\u201d bridge with a substructure rating of 4. <\/p>\n

Washington is home to eight of the Forbes 400 Richest people in the world, including Bill Gates (#1), and Steve Ballmer (#19) of Microsoft, Howard Schultz (#311) of Starbucks, and Jeff Bezos (#11) of Amazon.com. Together, just these four individuals hold US$106.6 billion\u2013more than two and a half times that earmarked for infrastructure in the Fiscal Year 2014 national budget proposal by Obama.<\/p>\n

The author also recommends:<\/em><\/p>\n

\n The Minnesota bridge collapse: One more indictment of the profit system<\/a>
\n
[4 August 2007]\n <\/p>\n


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This article originally appeared on: World Socialist Web Site<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0 By Christine Schofelt 25 May 2013 The four-lane north section of Skagit River Bridge, which is part of I-5 north of Seattle, Washington, collapsed at about 7 p.m. on Thursday evening after its girders were reportedly hit by a truck carrying oversize heavy equipment. According to the Washington Department of Transportation, there were no […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-36072","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-breaking-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36072","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36072"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36072\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36072"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36072"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36072"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}