By Ron Shawgo, The Journal Gazette
The kind of fatal bridge disaster that gripped Minneapolis last week and awakened the nation to bridge safety seldom occurs.
But when it does, the bridge you cross on the way to work or your child goes over riding to school assumes new significance.
There are more than 18,000 bridges in Indiana, and nearly a fourth of them have some sort of deficiency, either structurally or traffic volumes, and federal construction standards have outdated them.
The Indiana Department of Transportation says few of the bridges it maintains on interstates and state roads are rated poor. Likewise, in northeast Indiana the condition of county-maintained bridges appears to have improved in the last couple of years.
But for county-maintained bridges statewide, the picture is cloudy.
"We have some smaller counties that tend to struggle a little more with those sorts of things, and we have bigger counties that maybe have better access to funding," said John Haddock, director of the Indiana Local Technical Assistance Program. "I think what you'll find is a range of how they do with keeping up with maintenance and/or replacement of bridges."