Iowa has the most dangerous bridges in the nation
Article continues below
Iowa, Pennsylvania, and Oklahoma have the most structurally deficient bridges.
Those are among the key findings in a new analysis of the U.S. Department of Transportation's recently-released 2015 "National Bridge Inventory" database.
The American Road & Transportation Builders Association (ARTBA), which conducts an annual review of state bridge data collected by the federal agency, notes that if placed end-to-end, the deck surface of the nation's structurally deficient bridges would stretch from New York City to Miami (1,340 miles).
About nine-and-a-half percent of the nation's approximately 610,000 bridges are classified as structurally deficient, ARTBA found, but cars, trucks, school buses and emergency vehicles cross these deficient structures nearly 204 million times a day.
Almost all of the 250 most heavily crossed structurally deficient bridges are on urban highways, particularly in California. Nearly 85 percent were built before 1970.
Iowa (5,025), Pennsylvania (4,783), Oklahoma (3,776), Missouri (3,222), Nebraska (2,474), Kansas (2,303), Illinois (2,244), Mississippi (2,184), North Carolina (2,085) and California (2,009) have the most structurally deficient bridges, the analysis found.
The District of Columbia (10), Nevada (35), Delaware (48), Hawaii (60) and Utah (95) have the least.
At least 15 percent of the bridges in eight states—Rhode Island (23 percent), Pennsylvania (21 percent), Iowa (21 percent), South Dakota (20 percent), Oklahoma (16 percent), Nebraska (16 percent), North Dakota (16 percent) and West Virginia (15 percent)—fall in the structurally deficient category. ■