“2024 Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse” by Fvasconcellos is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

March 26th, 2024, 1:28 AM, Francis Scott Key Bridge. The road has just been closed due to a cargo ship just about to hit one of its piers, a call being made just in time to save the majority of civilians. Unfortunately, there wasn’t enough time to get all the construction workers. Only two survived.

Could this have been avoided? CNN says, “46,100 of the 617,000 bridges across the United States, or 7.5% of all bridges, are considered structurally deficient and in poor condition.” Not to mention that some of these bridges are also extremely old and riddled with rust or weakly supported. 

The collapse was devastating, and the ship involved with the accident was delayed indefinitely and ships in the Port of Baltimore were stuck until the Army Corps of Engineers managed to clear enough wreckage to allow them through. It’s possible even more shipments will be delayed until the wreckage is fully cleaned up. 

Bridges can collapse for various reasons; however, engineers have found that they collapse most commonly due to corrosion and various faults in the support beams holding the bridges up. As said in an AP article, “Four-fifths have problems with their substructures (the legs holding them up) or their superstructures (the arms supporting their load). And more than 15,800 of the poor bridges also were listed in poor shape a decade ago.” 

This means the problem of old bridges not being maintained properly is not new; it’s been around for over a decade, but not much has been done about these problems as inspectors did not accurately calculate how many problems there really were and money is not put into maintenance.

To avoid more bridges collapsing so easily and to avoid another tragedy like this, it’s important for the nation to invest money into bridge repairs to improve their infrastructure.

Nevada is said to have $450 million dollars in bridge repairs by the ASCE, given from the Business Investment Board (BIB) but only 1% of bridges are considered to be structurally deficient. In order to help more bridge repair projects, the money allocated to Nevada for fixing bridges by the BIB should be given to other bridges that are seen in worse condition.