Recent inspections have found "advanced deterioration" of the pier foundations of the Maryland Transportation Authority's two bridges over the Susquehanna River on Interstate 95 and U.S. 40 - forcing the agency to put repairs to the supporting structures on a fast track.
Dennis Simpson, the authority's capital planning director, said the deterioration poses no immediate danger. "It's safe. We need to do the work to keep it safe," he said. "If it was a situation where the bridge couldn't stay open, we would have closed the bridge. We do need to correct it."
The two projects, expected to cost a combined $53 million, are an indicator of the mounting cost of maintaining Maryland's critical infrastructure at a time when many structures are showing signs of advanced age. The toll authority's recently released draft six-year budget plan - totaling $3.5 billion - includes several expensive projects to address long-overdue maintenance on the bridges under its control - including the Bay Bridge.
The mounting number of rehabilitation projects - and the increasing costs of undertaking them - are putting pressure on the authority's budget at a time when toll revenues have fallen as a result of recession-related traffic declines. Teri Moss, a spokeswoman for the authority, said the growing list of urgent projects is forcing the agency to reconsider its current toll levels.
"We're constantly evaluating, so we might be looking at a potential toll increase in the next couple of years," she said. The authority's basic toll levels have remained unchanged since 2003 except for an increase imposed on trucks and other multi-axle vehicles earlier this year.
Unlike most of the other bridge projects in the budget plan, the repairs to the Susquehanna bridges involve the foundations that support the surfaces upon which motorists drive. For now, the rehabilitation of the piers of the Millard E. Tydings Memorial Bridge on I-95 and the Thomas J. Hatem Memorial Bridge on U.S. 40 is in an engineering stage that is expected to continue through the middle of 2011. The construction phase will follow over the next two years.
Inspections of both bridges turned up deterioration of the foundation upon which sit the pillars that hold up the bridge deck, or driving surface. The authority also found that "scour" from the flow of the river has eroded the pillars themselves.
