The collapse of the Interstate 35W bridge over the Mississippi River in Minneapolis on Wednesday hit some people in the Tri-State particularly hard. It brought back memories and stories of the Silver Bridge.
The Silver Bridge connected the communities of Point Pleasant, W.Va., and Gallipolis, Ohio. In the early evening hours of Dec. 15, 1967, the bridge fell into the Ohio River, killing 46 people. It was less than 40 years old, but it suffered from a fatal design flaw that could not be detected with the technology of the time.
After the Silver Bridge disaster, requirements for inspecting bridges tightened. Today, all major bridges are inspected thoroughly every two years at least. Those with known structural problems are inspected annually.
As events in Minneapolis showed, things can go wrong. It will be months before investigators pinpoint the probable cause of the bridge collapse. And years of litigation likely will follow.
Whatever the cause, the failure of the I-35W bridge should force people in the Tri-State and elsewhere to ask themselves about the condition of their infrastructure transportation and otherwise.
It takes years just to get cable median barriers installed along busy, accident-prone sections of Interstate 64, and that work remains unfinished until every mile of I-64 between the Big Sandy River to the six-lane section in Putnam County has barriers.
Improving roads is far down the list of priorities of state officials, although roads are used by practically everyone every day. West Virginia spends too much money building four-lane highways connecting sparsely populated areas of the state. Its resources would be better spent in straightening curves and widening roadways on some of the heavily used two-lane roads.
As long as we're talking about infrastructure, shouldn't we ask if we've paid enough attention to that which we barely think of because we take it for granted? That list would include sewers, water mains, our electric grid, telecommunications and Internet access.
The focus of today is, of course, on bridges. That has been a touchy subject in this area since the Silver Bridge collapse. The Silver Bridge was replaced by the four-lane Silver Memorial Bridge, which opened to traffic on Dec. 15, 1969, two years to the day after the Silver Bridge fell. In that time, we have seen many new bridges built over the Ohio River. There have been new bridges at Marietta and Belpre, Ohio; Ravenswood, W.Va.; Huntington; Ashland; Greenup, Ky., and Portsmouth, Ohio. A new bridge is under construction connecting Pomeroy, Ohio, and Mason, W.Va.
The Nick J. Rahall II Bridge at Huntington and the Ben Williamson Bridge at Ashland have been renovated in that time.
But we're still waiting on a new bridge at Ironton. The Ohio Department of Transportation has had setback after setback in replacing the 85-year-old bridge, which was the first highway bridge over the Ohio between Wheeling and Cincinnati.
If the rest of our infrastructure had received as much attention as our bridges, perhaps the Tri-State would be in much better shape economically.
We can empathize with the people of the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. But we can also take Wednesday's disaster as a challenge to improve our seen and unseen infrastructure, both for safety and for our economic future.