Make bridge inspection reports public
When a heavily traveled Pittsburgh bridge collapsed Jan. 28 into a ravine, taking several cars and a mass-transit bus along for the ride, it put an exclamation point on well-known nationwide bridge problems.
But how bad are individual bridges? Don’t ask, at least in Pennsylvania.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette recently established a searchable database on 22,000 bridges, based on notes from state Department of Transportation inspectors that the newspaper had discovered online. When it asked for detailed inspection reports for bridges, PennDOT rejected the request and later removed the inspection notes that the Post-Gazette had found.
PennDOT has made progress in repairing and replacing old bridges, including through some innovative administrative changes to accelerate the process. The agency also provides broad data, including defined ratings for each bridge under its jurisdiction, but not the actual inspection reports.
Secrecy should not be part of the state’s bridge strategy. People have a right to know the details about the bridges that they not only own but drive across every day.
A PennDOT official offered the Post-Gazette two shop-worn excuses for shrouding inspection reports in secrecy: The reports are engineering documents that residents and the media might misunderstand; and terrorists (who apparently can understand the reports better than most Pennsylvanians and journalists) could use the reports to attack bridges.
The terrorism dodge dates to the 2007 collapse of the Interstate 35-West bridge over the Mississippi River in Minneapolis, which killed 13 people and injured more than 100 others. Even though the collapse resulted from structural problems that had been documented in inspections, the Department of Homeland Security sent letters to all 50 state transportation departments advising them not to disclose inspection reports so as not to give an edge to terrorists.
Residents of West Virginia, Ohio, New York and Maryland must be smarter than their Pennsylvania neighbors and less concerned about terrorism, because they can obtain inspection reports of individual bridges, which are considered public documents.
Inspection reports should be public documents in Pennsylvania, too. PennDOT’s duty is not to hide them, but to explain them. The Legislature should mandate that transparency.