Small business owner, Charles Allen Jr., was traveling on the I-495 Southbound in Delaware as he does often, when he noticed that something was wrong with the bridge. It appeared to be separating. He tried to contact the Delaware Department of Transportation to alert them of the safety hazard, but wasn’t able to reach anyone.
Fearing for the safety of motorists taking the bridge, he decided to call 911 to report what he called a “crazy emergency”. He can be heard on the 911 recording telling the dispatcher:
“The bridge on 495 that goes over the [Christina] River between 12th Street and – what’s the name, Terminal Avenue – the bridge appears to be separating.”
The call ended there with officials saying they’d look into it. That was on April 15th. Nothing happened for weeks.
Several weeks later, on May 29th, an engineer working for the firm Duffield Associates, sent in photos of the damaged bridge to DelDOT and the bridge was closed four days later, on Monday June 2nd, 2014. Over a month and half after Allen’s original call.
The bridge is now closed indefinitely. The damage is expected to take months to fix.
DelDOT Transportation Secretary Shailen Bhatt recently noted that he was unaware of Allen’s call. He’s focusing his efforts on working on the bridge and trying to get it open as soon as possible. In response to how the situation was handled he says:
“There was no loss of life,” Bhatt said. “That, to me, means that – whether we did it exactly right – the important thing is that we got it closed.”
The question remains, what took DelDOT so long to deal with a structural issue on a major bridge after it was brought to their attention several weeks prior? Does the DOT use loss of life as a reason to fix a problem promptly? Hopefully we don’t have to find out.