Following yesterday’s collapse in Minnesota, I wanted to see how Harrisburg’s bridges stacked up. The information here is taken from nationalbridges.com, which provides database access to the National Bridge Inventory.

Harvey Taylor: Built 1951. Sufficiency rating of 53.7%. Deck condition: Good. Superstructure Condition: Fair. Structural Evaluation: “Somewhat better than minimum adequacy to tolerate being left in place”. This looks to be the worst of our arterial bridges.

John Harris (I-83): Built 1960 (pretty much all of our Interstates were built in the 1960s). Sufficiency rating: 73%. Deck: Good. Superstructure: Fair. Structural Evaluation: “Somewhat better than minimum adequacy to tolerate being left in place”. Note that this is considered two bridges; one for the river and one for the land. The land is rated more or less the same, except that the deck is “satisfactory”.

State Street: Built 1930. Superstructure: Fair. Substructure: Fair. Structural Evaluation “Somewhat better than minimum adequacy to tolerate being left in place”. Reassuring to know that so many of our bridges are “somewhat better than barely adequate”. Sufficiency rating: 75.4%.

81 / 22 Interchange: Built 1977. Sufficiency rating: 90.7%. These are actually in pretty good shape all around.

The site is so slow that I’ve been unable to locate the Minneapolis bridge that collapsed, nor am I going to suffer through looking at every bridge in Harrisburg (there are dozens). But I recall reading that its sufficiency rating was 56%.