Caltrans officials on Thursday began emergency structural inspections of 69 bridges across California in the wake of the collapse of a span in Minnesota.
Many of those bridges are among nearly 3,000 in the state that the federal government found to be structurally deficient, with inspectors concluding that they must be repaired or replaced.
State transportation officials said Thursday that the federal findings don't mean the bridges are unsafe for vehicle use. Routine inspections have found all spans to be structurally sound, they said.
"If we felt that a bridge was unsafe, we would close it immediately," said Doug Failing, director of the California Department of Transportation's Los Angeles and Ventura County operations.
Caltrans Director Will Kempton said the state plans to inspect the 69 bridges built with steel trusses similar to those that failed in the Minnesota accident. The state owns 22 of those, and city and county governments own the rest.
The failure of the Minnesota bridge -- which was also classified by the federal government as "structurally deficient" -- has sparked concerns about whether other bridges are in danger of collapsing.
The U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics, which catalogs federal highway and bridge data provided by the states annually, reported problems with about 6,700 bridges in California. Those include steel-truss bridges as well as other types of spans. Of those, 2,994 were considered structurally deficient, needing "significant maintenance attention, rehabilitation or replacement."
The others were found to be "functionally obsolete," because the spans weren't built to handle today's traffic loads. Federal officials found these bridges in many cases were too narrow or didn't have proper vertical clearance.
About half of the roughly 24,000 bridges in California are owned by the state, and the rest are owned by city and county governments. Of the bridges found to be deficient, about half are owned by the state.
Most of the bridges owned by the state had problems with their surfaces, which officials insisted late Thursday were not critical flaws.
But 63 of those state-owned spans, including 27 in Southern California, had more significant structural problems, according to state records. Detailed data were not available on bridges owned by county and local governments.
