After the collapse of the Interstate 35 bridge in Minneapolis, federal and state officials scrambled to identify problem bridges nationwide.
Orange County has 636 bridges for freeways, roads and rail lines. Of those, 105 have been designated structurally deficient or functionally obsolete, according to a published analysis of data from the National Bridge Inventory, which is compiled by the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Federal Highway Administration.
Engineers are watching and working on the bridges. But none are in imminent danger of collapsing.
Keeping them from getting to that point is keeping engineers busy.
“Anytime a major catastrophe happens, like what happened in Minnesota, an immediate call for action and review typically result in some business opportunities,” said Harvey Gobas, vice president of Psomas Inc., an engineering consultant with an office in Costa Mesa. “I don’t believe that Caltrans has enough people to do all the work that needs to be done so they will need to hire local consultants and engineers.”
Los Angeles-based Psomas specializes in land development, water and transportation. Psomas employs 21 licensed engineers in its OC offices, according to the Business Journal’s list on page 74.
Gobas chaired the Los Angeles section of the American Society of Civil Engineers infrastructure report card in 2002 and 2005.
Psomas hasn’t seen any additional business from the designations and the bridge catastrophe, Gobas said. But he said he believes the attention and need for funding to fix roads and sewers and bridges would create new business for engineers.
Part of why the scary-sounding labels of structurally deficient and functionally obsolete didn’t create gobs of new assignments for engineers is because those designations don’t mean the bridges are falling down, Gobas said.
A functionally obsolete bridge means that it is 50 years old or older and may have been designed to carry less traffic at the time of construction. But it’s still usable.
Structurally deficient bridges can mean the bridge is missing a guardrail or it has been damaged in some way, but will likely not collapse, he said.
“I really wish I was a bridge inspector because there’s going to be a lot of work in the public works sector down the road,” said Larry Gates, president of Anaheim Hills-based Development Resource Consultants Inc., a consulting engineering firm that provides services to commercial, industrial, retail and residential developers.
Having two bridges collapse in a short time span,an overpass fell in Northern California injuring two people in July,drew the focus of the California Department of Transportation and engineers.
But Gobas said that highways, roads, underground pipelines for gas, electric lines, solid waste management and urban runoff need to be improved as well.
“We need to pay attention to all these infrastructure categories before something bad happens again,” he said. “As infrastructure ages across the country more bad things like the bridge collapse will happen.”
Not long before the Minnesota bridge collapse, “there was a steam pipe in New York that exploded in cold weather,” Gobas said. “That pipe was 80 years old. Things don’t last forever. Next time it may not be a steam pipe that explodes or a bridge that collapses, it could be a flood control channel.”
Funding for infrastructure improvements is on the way. Last November, California voters passed bonds to the tune of $43 billion, while the Senate this month approved $1 billion of funding to help speed along the repair and replacement of the nation’s ailing bridges.
“Those bonds were just a down payment on what we need and doesn’t even begin to cover the total costs necessary to fund the entire state’s infrastructure improvement needs,” Gobas said.
It would cost $33.2 billion to raise OC’s transportation system grade by one (to a B-), according to the American Society of Civil Engineers 2005 infrastructure report.
“It’s like a car,” Gobas said. “You have to spend the money on it for it to last a long time. If you properly maintain a bridge and spend money on it, it will last longer than its 50-year life expectancy. But if you don’t spend $1 billion today, you’ll end up spending $10 billion or $20 billion later on.”
The state needs $37 billion annually to improve and maintain infrastructure that includes roads, highways, bridges, parks, aviation, open space, water, solid waste and urban runoff.
California faces a $370 billion financial hole to update its roads and bridges, according to Yazdan Emrani, who helped compile the American Society of Civil Engineers’ 2006 report card on state infrastructure. At the national level, engineers predict a $1.6 trillion funding gap in the next five years just for repairs and maintenance, much less to accommodate the demands of future growth.
Local transportation improvement projects are partly supported through Measure M, a half-cent sales tax approved by voters in 1990 and extended last year. The program provides money for freeways, roads and transit.
“A lot of money needs to come from local funding sources like Measure M to help pay for improvements,” Gobas said.
While bonds and government funding will help infrastructure repairs, private investment likely will be needed as budget short falls fail to meet the task, according to Investing in Global Infrastructure 2007: An Emerging Asset Class, a report released by Ernst & Young LLP.
“Governments urgently need funding and private sector expertise to improve or replace aging infrastructure,” said Dale Anne Reiss, Ernst & Young’s global real estate director. “Investors can benefit through the steady long-term returns infrastructure investments can provide.”
And private investors are starting to target some infrastructure projects, drawn by potentially higher returns than other investments.
Booz Allen Hamilton, a global strategy and technology consulting firm, estimated five-year returns on infrastructure investment to range from 8% to 14% depending on the type of investment, with wastewater plants garnering the most potential returns.
