The Washington Bridge may have grabbed most of the headlines, but it is by no means the only piece of Rhode Island infrastructure in urgent need of repair.
Rhode Island PBS and The Public’s Radio identified 119 bridges listed as “Poor” in the most recent available data from the National Bridge Inventory, a federal survey documenting the state of every bridge in the U.S. longer than 20 feet that carries motor vehicles on a public street.
Of the 1,200 bridges RIDOT currently inspects on a regular basis, including smaller pedestrian bridges, 776 need some sort of repair, according to an analysis of NBI data by the American Road & Transportation Builder’s Association, a national trade group.
RIDOT’s inventory includes 783 Rhode Island bridges that carry motor vehicles, and more than 15% of them are in poor condition. Just 4 states have a higher percentage of structurally-deficient bridges.
A significant number of those bridges — 75 in all — have been on the “Poor” list every year for nearly the past decade. About half of them are located in and around Providence. The rest are scattered all over the state.
Any one of them could be an accident waiting to happen.
RIDOT director Peter Alviti has been eager to reassure the public that the problem is well in hand, noting the state has repaired or replaced 290 bridges during his tenure.
“We’ve spent the last 10 years at DOT building a wonderful trust between us, the legislature and the people of Rhode Island,” Alviti told state House and Senate lawmakers back in February.
Referring to the Washington Bridge, he said, “We don’t want to see this one incident and this one bridge disrupt that trust.”
Alviti added, “The bottom line is people want to know that a bridge is safe.”
But plenty of Rhode Islanders have their doubts.
Work on the new westbound Washington Bridge is set to begin next month, a full year-and-a-half after it closed. The total price tag is expected to be more than $400 million. The project has taken longer and is likely to cost more money than initially projected.
According to former U.S Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Rhode Island is lucky the Washington Bridge is just an expensive, enduring traffic jam. After visiting the bridge in March 2024, he told reporters it could be worse.
Had a sharp-eyed inspector not spotted a safety issue, prompting state officials to close the westbound span in December 2023, Buttigieg insisted the state could have faced a major catastrophe.
“Lives were saved by the inspection that found this issue,” Buttigieg said then.
While that may be true, it raises concerns about dozens of other aging Rhode Island bridges.
How safe are they?
Some are so small you would otherwise barely even notice them.
For instance, our team visited one bridge in Central Falls that has been rated as “Poor” since at least 2016. Located along Sacred Heart Avenue, the bridge carries about 7,000 cars a day, according to NBI data. Underneath, large patches of rebar are visible where concrete has been falling away. Plywood boards keep the big chunks from dropping down in one section. But the plywood ceiling doesn’t cover the whole bridge. One side of the underpass is littered with boulders.
The section reinforced by plywood runs right over Amtrak’s northeast corridor. Trains rush by multiple times a day. You don’t have to be an engineer to see a disaster waiting to happen.
Rhode Island PBS and The Public’s Radio reached out to RIDOT to learn more about the department’s work on the Sacred Heart Ave. bridge, but the agency did not respond to requests for comment.
On a grander scale, there’s the Claiborne Pell/Newport Bridge, where the potholes that pockmark the surface are actually the least of people’s worries.
The National Transportation Safety Board recently flagged the Pell Bridge among 68 U.S. bridges in urgent need of inspection. Their concern is that large ocean-going vessels passing underneath the bridge might strike one of the pylons, bringing the whole thing tumbling down – just like what happened at the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, only here in Narragansett Bay.
In April, the Rhode Island Turnpike and Bridge Authority, which maintains and operates the Pell Bridge and three others, told the NTSB it has “initiated engagement” with an engineering firm to perform vulnerability assessments.
RITBA confirmed to us it retained the engineering firm Modjeski & Masters to conduct a $227,000 study. Their report is expected before the end of the year.
Meanwhile, RITBA’s own internal review concluded that the ships passing under the Pell Bridge are smaller than the ones being unloaded in the Port of Baltimore. The agency claims pilot practices, navigational practices, and the design of the bridge itself makes a catastrophic incident unlikely.
RITBA’s conclusion, at least for now: “No actions were determined to be needed” to protect the Pell Bridge.
For his part, RIDOT’s Peter Alviti has told lawmakers his team now takes extra precautions in the wake of the Washington Bridge fiasco.
“We instituted practices that go well above even what is normally practiced throughout the United States,” he testified to a joint meeting of the state Senate and House oversight committees in February. “We have instituted practices that both increase our surveillance and the way we analyze the more complex structures, especially the most complex ones.”
RIDOT declined our requests to talk with inspectors responsible for the 783 motor vehicle bridges it manages. State officials have been especially guarded about the Washington Bridge, citing ongoing litigation.
The state has filed suit against 13 subcontractors, blaming them for the problems at the Washington Bridge, claiming breach of contract, fiduciary duty and negligence.
Earlier this month, two of those subcontractors pushed back, claiming “RIDOT knew or should have known” that visual inspections of the Washington Bridge weren’t good enough.
Barletta Heavy Division Inc. and Aetna Bridge Company, two of the firms that won a 2021 contract to rehabilitate the Washington Bridge, filed court papers citing a 1992 inspection report filed by the engineering firm A.G. Lichtenstein & Associates that recommended the state implement special inspections using radar and other technology to look for corrosion.
Public records obtained by Rhode Island PBS and The Public’s Radio suggest that RIDOT has not conducted those tests for at least a decade, relying instead on regular visual inspections.
Had they performed those kinds of special inspections, the two companies maintain, they might have known sooner about the problems with the bridge’s post-tensioning system that ultimately forced the closure of the westbound span.
“The remarkable thing looking at the Washington Bridge project is that here we are, a few years out, and it’s still unclear who is ultimately responsible for this debacle,” said Marc Dunkelman, a fellow at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs.
Dunkelman recently wrote the bestselling book Why Nothing Works, diagnosing why public officials seem to be no longer capable of big things such as building and maintaining infrastructure.
The problem, according to him, is simple: “There’s no clear authority in most of these cases of who exactly is in charge, who’s responsible?”
“I don’t know the specifics here,” he said. “But the feeling that people in Rhode Island have now is that it seems as though no one is accepting responsibility for this disaster, and that’s born from a more general feeling that it’s very hard to determine who is responsible for what, when, and where.”
