It sounded like a no-brainer: 13-ton school buses crossing 3-, 4- and 5-ton bridges running over busy railroad tracks? Trucks weighing up to 40 tons specifically directed to cross an 11-ton bridge over the same railroad lines? Couldn't be? Could be. In fact, that - and other potential disasters - are just what Gannett Newspapers found in the northern New York City suburbs as part of a two-part series in November that stemmed from searches through a statewide database of bridge conditions.
Among the possibilities for serious trouble found by the newspaper were these: Fully-loaded school buses, which weigh anywhere from 10 to 15 tons running every school day over at least six bridges with signs barring vehicles of more than 3, 4 or 5 tons. Large vehicles ranging from 6-ton delivery trucks to 15-ton fire trucks to 40-ton tractor-trailers using the same bridges as the buses. A sign posted by one village that directed industrial truck traffic such as cement mixers, tractor-trailers and garbage trucks weighing well over 20 tons when full over an 11-ton bridge.
After the newspaper chain notified about 10 local busing and trucking companies, all vowed to immediately change their routes. But that didn't stop experts on bridge maintenance and construction from warning that the potential for crisis continued to loom across the state. The difficulties in dealing with the problem included the century-old age of some bridges, commercial traffic routes running over many of these spans, police manpower too limited to consistently enforce the weight limits and a professed lack of funds by a commuter railroad that owns many of the most endangered bridges.
The story began with an idea to look at general bridge conditions contained in a complex ASCII, fixed-length database of about 100 heavily coded fields describing the latest bridge inspections and results, kept by the state transportation department. Initially, about 50 of the fields were imported into a database manager using Paradox for DOS. We used a fixed-length importer called FLIMPORT that allowed us to pick and choose which fields we wanted to look at.
We began to notice that many of the bridges popping up in the weight-limit field ran through commercial areas. We pulled them out, sorted them by community and weight limit, then camped out by 15 bridges for about a half-hour each. It took only a few minutes of observation at 11 of the bridges to see that the limits were routinely ignored. Nearby residents and merchants said the situation had gone on for years and that they figured it was allowed.
Meanwhile, school-bus officials in several communities, as well as businesses whose trucks were seen using the bridges, professed surprise and ignorance of the problem and immediately said they would tell their drivers to re-route themselves. A county bus official said he believed it was all right to run 15-ton buses over 10- and 11-ton bridges, but later changed his mind after a state bridge official strongly suggested otherwise.
A follow-up story is planned in a few months to see what, if any, changes are really made.