Although the state has made great strides in protecting its own bridges from earthquakes, hundreds of bridges maintained by cities and counties across California remain unfixed.
A Times review of state and county records found that nearly 600 bridges and overpasses that officials identified as being at the highest risk for collapse in a major temblor have yet to be reinforced. They include several landmark spans in Los Angeles, such as the Hyperion bridge in Silver Lake and the Art Deco 6th Street bridge across the Los Angeles River downtown.
Counties and cities have struggled to find the money for the retrofitting projects, which have had to compete --not always successfully -- with more bread-and-butter projects like widening roads and fixing potholes.
"The cities have other priorities," said Pat DeChellis, deputy director of the Los Angeles County Department of Public Works. "They could use those funds for lots of other transportation purposes."
The California Department of Transportation has done much better: Of the roughly 2,200 quake-vulnerable bridges maintained by the agency, all but 11 have been retrofitted. To achieve this, the state has spent $2.4 billion since 1989, when the Loma Prieta earthquake collapsed an elevated freeway in Oakland, killing 43 people.
Local governments, however, complain that they don't have the financial resources for retrofitting, even though the spans they are responsible for carry thousands of commuters daily.
In the Southland, these include the La Cienega Boulevard bridge over Ballona Creek on the Westside, Avenue 26 over the Arroyo Seco, Imperial Highway over the San Gabriel River in Downey and Norwalk, Van Buren Boulevard over the Santa Ana River in Riverside and a MacArthur Boulevard bridge at John Wayne Airport in Orange County.
The work is expensive: Fixing the 6th Street bridge alone would cost $140 million. In 2002, the Legislature and then-Gov. Gray Davis eliminated a transportation fund that had been earmarked for the city and county bridge retrofits. Although federal money is also available for the program, Sacramento's decision meant local agencies had to come up with matching funds on their own.
Last year Congress moved to boost retrofitting efforts by reducing the level of matching funds required for all bridge projects from 20% to 11.47%, citing concerns over the deteriorating state of the nation's bridges. As a result, the amount that local agencies will have to pay is much less than it had been previously.
