The story goes that an inspector found the crack in the Mississippi River bridge and immediately got on the phone, yelling at somebody to get people off the bridge and shut down all traffic. That person deserves a medal. The rest of the story doesn't have as many heroes.
This newspaper's Noel Oman reports that the feds have opened not one but two investigations into the performance of the Arkansas Department of Transportation's bridge inspection program. The I-40 bridge over the country's biggest river has a crack large enough to scare everybody who's ever been over it--and who hasn't been?
The inspector general's office at the U.S. Department of Transportation and the Federal Highway Administration are on the case(s), and everybody, even those being inspected, should hope both agencies don't miss a thing.
The leader of the inspection team that missed the crack in 2019 and 2020 has already been fired. But if the process in place allows one person's mistake to put this many people at risk, then we're missing duplication somewhere. A Mississippi River bridge inspection would seem to call for overlapping checks and redundancies. The feds might have some suggestions. Or more than suggestions.
Apparently the state also wants an outside engineering firm to review the bridge inspection program, especially the equipment used. The more the merrier.
"We're learning we have weakness in the program," said Lorie Tudor, the director of the state Department of Transportation. "We didn't catch this fracture as quickly as we should have. All that is going to make the whole nation better. It's going to make us better, but it's going to make the whole inspection program across the nation better."
That statement beats whataboutism, deflections, financial complaints and excuses. Let us be judged. And then let us correct mistakes, get the right people in the right places, and get this east-west link going again.
And while the judging continues, let's also ask this: Why was the cracked steel beam made of a grade of steel the Federal Highway Administration says is susceptible to cracks? This bridge was opened in 1973; the building of it started in the 1960s. Certainly there will be improvements made over time not only to inspections and welding, but also to raw materials. Technical processes will improve over time, but "susceptible to cracks" seems to merit more than a memo to state departments.
There are many questions. And probably many more to come. The best thing to do is to answer them all, honestly and without fear. Some of us are old enough to remember the front pages when another Interstate 40 bridge, just over the Arkansas-Oklahoma border, collapsed in May 2002. Fourteen people died.
Let us be judged. And improved, advanced, bettered.