(The following story by Bob Green appeared on The Independent website on December 27.)
STUYVESANT, N.Y. — While the state released a report this week affirming the safety of many major highway bridges around the state, a local engineer has called for the closure of another bridge in this town-one that carries trains over a town road-because of concern for public safety.
Last summer Robert W. Clark, a retired professional engineer and engineering professor, first identified serious rusting and missing concrete that left gaping holes in parts of the Schoolhouse Road bridge. That bridge was closed in September as was another bridge over railroad tracks on White Mills Road in the Town of Chatham. And Professor Clark has renewed his call for action to protect the public from a deteriorated bridge on nearby Ridge Road, taking his concerns to the regional chapter of a national engineering organization.
But unlike the highway bridges, which are inspected by the state DOT, the Ridge Road bridge carries railroad tracks above the road and is inspected only by the railroad company CSX. Neither the town nor the DOT is privy to the company’s inspection report on that bridge.
Nicholas Choubah, regional structure engineer for DOT, said the railroad only “has to certify they have inspected; they don’t follow the formats of DOT.” Mr. Choubah described DOT’s own inspections as “almost like a physical for the bridge. We inspect more [than CSX] because we need the data, not only for public safety but also for maintenance planning. We have always taken pride in our inspections,” which he says were rated highly by a state commission.
DOT’s bridge inspection program was instituted in 1987, after the collapse of a Thruway bridge over the Schoharie Creek. Now, every bridge is rated by the state in over 40 categories on a scale from 7, for new, to 1, which means the bridge needs to be replaced.
But Professor Clark, a Valatie resident who taught engineering for decades, says that the recent experience raises questions about the system. In a December 17 letter to Stuyvesant Town Supervisor Valerie Bertram, he wrote, “My evaluation of both bridges has been validated by the closure of the Schoolhouse Road Bridge. DOT’s own inspection reports had been shielding appropriate scrutiny of the bridge. My review of DOT’s 2006 report has shown such reports to be qualitative rather than rigorous, with no mention of the actual magnitude of corrosion.”
Prof. Clark also recently shared his findings with the Mohawk-Hudson Section Board of the American Society of Civil Engineers, and that group agreed to refer the matter to the society’s national office, after two of the society’s officials visited Stuyvesant to learn more about the bridges.
The Schoolhouse Road Bridge, which is also owned by CSX, was “red flagged” September 21, a week after Prof. Clark’s concerns about the bridge were first published in The Independent. According to Mr. Choubah of the DOT, September 21 was also the date of the scheduled annual inspection for the bridge. The full inspection couldn’t be completed that day, because a CSX employee was not immediately available to assist in the process. After an apparently lengthy internal quality control review, the final report was posted on DOT’s internal system November 26.
Ratings information for all bridges inspected by DOT is posted at www.nysdot.gov/portal/page/portal/main/bridgedata. The current report for Columbia County is dated 12/9/2007, but it still shows a rating for the Schoolhouse Road bridge from its inspection in 2006. The rating, 3.627, is fifth from the bottom of 246 bridges inspected by DOT in the county. Any rating less than 5 is considered “structurally deficient.” Columbia county has 44 such bridges, or 17%, compared with 12% statewide. Neighboring Rensselaer County has 34 structurally deficient bridges out of 264 total, or 12.8%.
According to DOT, “A structurally deficient bridge, when left open to traffic, typically requires significant maintenance and repair to remain in service and eventual rehabilitation or replacement to address deficiencies. In order to remain in service, structurally deficient bridges are often posted with weight limits. Those classifications do not mean the bridges are unsafe, rather that they would require repairs or modifications to restore their condition or improve their functionality.”
On December 26, the DOT issued a report on the inspection of 49 so-called deck truss bridges statewide, including the Brooklyn Bridge in New York City and the Patroon Island Bridge on I-90 over the Hudson River. The press release announcing the report said the bridges “are safe for travel,” although some require maintenance. The full report is available online at www.nysdot.gov/bridgedata/finalreport.
One thing not in dispute is whether the Schoolhouse Road bridge can be repaired. DOT’s Mr. Choubah said CSX “agreed with our assessment that the bridge needs replacement.” But when and who will pay are another matter. “In general, the owner replaces the bridge, but we can’t dictate. The closure [of the Schoolhouse Road bridge] remedied the public safety issue.”
Stuyvesant Highway Superintendent Bernard Kowalski says CSX has not been forthcoming about its plans. “They won’t even talk to us,” said Mr. Kowalski.
Prof. Clark’s letter supports that contention, noting that a CSX engineer offered to meet with him privately, but not with officials present. In October Prof. Clark called a CSX professional engineer named Halsey Brown, only be told that the company is not concerned about bridges “until visible distortion of members is apparent.” He said the company engineer told him, in effect, “The bridge must be visibly on the verge of collapse before any action need be taken.”
The CSX tracks run to the trestle over the Hudson River south of Castleton, a busy crossing for freight trains.
Prof. Clark also takes exception to DOT’s methods where corrosion is involved. The DOT rating is a weighted average of many factors arrived at by analyzing, in a computer model, the thickness of various structural members. Prof. Clark says such figures are not meaningful when structures are visibly eaten away, as happened with the Schoolhouse Road bridge.
A recent Safety Advisory from the Federal Railroad Administration warned railroads about adequate maintenance of their bridges. The FRA examined 52 train accidents from 1982 to 2006 in which “catastrophic structural failures” were involved. The accidents resulted in two injuries and no deaths, but the succeeding investigation found “instances where lack of adherence to the guidelines in the Bridge Safety Policy resulted in trains operating over structural deficiencies in steel bridges that could very easily have resulted in serious train accidents.”
According to the report, available at the website cryptome.org/fra091107.htm, most large railroads like CSX “generally conform to the FRA guidelines, but the agency has discovered instances where management had not adequately evaluated or addressed critical items delineated in railroad bridge inspection reports before they developed into critical failures or near-failures.”
Another concern of Prof. Clark is that federal guidelines aren’t sufficient for assuring that bridges are safe. He describes bridge inspectors as technicians who “detect indications of deterioration or other problems” but who may not be qualified “to perform the engineering calculations necessary to determine the safe capacity of a bridge.” A judgment on the safety of the bridge also requires a review by an engineer, although the FRA “has discovered several instances where a person who was not fully qualified to determine the safety of a bridge was dispatched to resolve a report of trouble,” said Prof. Clark.
The Ridge Road bridge is made of steel and has no paint on it anywhere. There are identical nameplates on both sides, which show its year of construction as 1924, but on the west side, the sign’s bottom half long ago corroded and fell to the ground.
Prof. Clark’s report to the civil engineers group describes what is less apparent. “Entrapped water above what is visible from below has surely rusted all the rest of the structure we cannot see,” and in his letter to the town, he warns of the possible environmental consequences of a freight train derailment so close to, and uphill from, the Hudson River.
The age of a bridge need not be a problem. Both of Columbia County’s 19th century bridges are rated “good.” According to DOT data, the oldest bridge in the county is in the Village of Chatham on Route 66 over the Stony Kill. Built in 1886, it is rated 5.214. The Stuyvesant Falls bridge, built in 1899, and is rated 6. It has been renovated in recent times.
The lowest rated bridge in the county is located 0.7 miles southwest of Ancram on Hall Hill Road, over the Roeliff Jansen Kill. It is owned by the county and was built in 1933. It is rated 3.429. The county is in the process of replacing that bridge.