Bridges in Fairfield County Among Most Deficient

FAIRFIELD COUNTY, Conn. – The other shoe just dropped on Fairfield County's bridges.

Only days after state Department of Transportation official told MSC that most of Connecticut's bridges are at least 50 years old and will need major upgrades or replacement over the next decade or two, a national reported released Wednesday states that Fairfield County’s elevated spans are among the most deficient in the nation.

Fairfield County is ranked in the report by a Washington, D.C., transportation advocacy group as having the fourth-highest number of motorists using structurally deficient bridges in metropolitan areas nationwide with populations of 1 million or fewer.

"The Fix We're In For: The State of Our Nation's Busiest Bridges," which measures daily traffic on aging and deficient bridges, states that Fairfield County averages 1.38 million drivers daily who use at least one of 107 spans in the Stamford/Norwalk/Bridgeport area that the Federal Highway Administration categorizes as “structurally deficient.”

The report states that 12.9 percent of bridge spans in the region are “deficient.”

That means a Fairfield County driver crosses a structurally deficient bridge every 16 seconds, according to the report.

Of the more than 5,200 bridges and elevated transportation spans across Connecticut, thousands are in Fairfield County, and the cost to replace and repair them over the next 20 years will be in the billions, state officials said.

While Connecticut ranks 20th among the 50 states and Puerto Rico in its total percentage of deficient bridges, according to a report issued in April by Transportation For America, this latest report ranks the state as 32nd, with less than 10 percent of bridges considered deficient.

Kevin Nursick, a spokesman for the state’s Department of Transportation, also said the structurally deficient category doesn't mean bridges are unsafe for drivers, only that repairs are required to reduce load capacity established in the bridge's initial design.

He said Connecticut bridge inspectors conduct more than 5,000 inspections every two years.

“We consider bridge inspection one of the most important things we do,” Nursick said. “We would never allow the public to travel on bridges that are not safe."

Nursick said the DOT maintains about 4,000 bridges, with about 3,000 of them 20 feet or longer. He said 189 are structurally deficient.

Of the 1,000 bridges 20 feet or shorter that the DOT maintains and inspects, 119 are structurally deficient, he said.

Nursick said while Connecticut transportation officials have been unable to establish long-range capital plans for bridge repairs and other infrastructure projects due to uncertainty over federal transportation funding, he indicated the state spends about $160 million annually on bridge replacement and repairs.

But over the next five years, Connecticut will need about $2.4 billion to complete maintenance, preservation and repair projects required to maintain transportation infrastructure, which include highways and bridges built in the 1950s and 1960s, according to a January report submitted to Gov. P. Dannel P. Malloy by one of his transition team committees.

"Bridge work is very expensive, about 10 times the cost of regular road work, so we are going to need continuing support and hopefully higher funding levels from the federal government to maintain our aging infrastructure," Nursick said.

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