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Documents obtained by the Daily News show that as early as 2006, inspectors found rusty holes in gussets on Pier 21 of the bridge — the same pier where inspectors shattered plates with hammers in an inspection this month.
Though MnDOT officials said two weeks ago that gussets weren’t a priority, records show inspectors closely examined Interstate Bridge plates and identified “advanced corrosion” on gussets in 2006 and 2007.
MnDOT officials now say those reports didn’t spark action because gussets weren’t considered a critical bridge component by its engineers until recently, when federal officials linked them to the collapse of the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis.
But at least two state lawmakers say the Winona bridge reports, coupled with a May report on the collapsed I-35W bridge, show a pattern of MnDOT officials deferring necessary bridge maintenance.
“All we have is a whole stack of pages documenting problems, and we have no clue whether anybody did anything about it,” said Sen. Sharon Erickson Ropes, DFL-Winona.
The Winona bridge reports remind Sen. Jim Carlson, DFL-Eagan of issues raised in the Gray Plant Mooty report, which legislators commissioned to investigate the collapse of the I-35W bridge. That report suggested that budget woes within MnDOT may have spurred the department to ignore warnings and defer bridge maintenance.
“There were things that were mentioned for years and years, and they were not addressed,” Carlson, who is also a mechanical engineer, said of both the I-35W and the Winona bridges.
In the Interstate Bridge reports inspectors noted missing rivets, rust forcing gussets apart and heavy section loss to corroded plates. Prior to that, MnDOT crews reinforced a single faulty gusset in 2000, according to the reports.
Inspectors “have been noticing corrosion and pack rust on that bridge for awhile,” said MnDOT bridge inspector Eric Evens, who evaluated the Winona Bridge in 2006 and wrote one of the reports.
MnDOT structures engineer Craig Falkum reviewed the 2006 and 2007 reports on the Winona bridge. He said the rusty gussets were flagged as a problem, but not as a “critical” concern, even though the gusset corrosion had worsened noticeably in the past two years.
But Evens said those findings came before faulty gussets contributed to the collapse of the I-35W bridge — a catastrophe that triggered a directive from the National Transportation Safety Board to pay more attention to gusset problems.
“In the light of the bridge failure, things are looked at differently,” Evens said. “Gusset plates got a lot more attention now than they did then.”
Sen. Steve Murphy, DFL-Winona, who is the chairman of the Senate Transportation Committee, said the reports are water under the bridge. He doesn’t want to blame engineers or inspectors for the closure, because engineers had “finite resources to take care of a lot of problems.”
The Legislature passed a $6.6 billion transportation package earlier this spring that may ease the financial strain on MnDOT, Murphy said.
“Hopefully we’ve improved the system fiscally to where repairs can take place before things like this occur,” Murphy said.
Ropes agreed that funding shortages may have influenced MnDOT engineers’ decisions about when and where to repair bridges.
“The reports raise a lot of questions in my mind,” Ropes said. “This is clearly one huge gaffe that is unacceptable.”
Expect bridge delays starting today
Traffic on the Interstate Bridge will be limited to one lane from 9 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. today and Friday as Minnesota Department of Transportation crews inspect the structure, weather permitting. Once the two-day inspection is done the bridge will be reopened to two lanes.
Contact Mark Sommerhauser at (507) 453-3514 or msommerhauser@winonadailynews.com
