Nearly 500 Crumbling Bridges In Georgia, Report Lists

ATLANTA, GA — As a tech and jobs hub in the Southeast, Georgia's highway system is key to moving workers and goods. Thousands of bridges exist in the state, and hundreds of them have key elements in need of repair, which comes with a hefty price tag. There are almost 500 structurally deficient bridges in the Peach State. The most heavily traveled span listed in need of repairs is part of Interstate 75 over Sope Creek in Cobb County, which sees 225,340 crossings every day.

The American Road and Transportation Builders Association, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group, published its annual bridge report Monday. The group ranked Georgia 45th worst in the nation for percent of structurally deficient bridges.

Here’s what they found for Georgia's bridges:

• Total bridges: 14,879
• Structurally deficient bridges: 494
• Percent of bridges that are structurally deficient: 3.3%
• Number of bridges in need of repair: 13,626
• Cost to repair those bridges: $5.7 billion

The state has made slight improvement since 2014, when 622 bridges were classified as structurally deficient. Four of the crumbling bridges are on the Interstate highway system.

See the list of Georgia bridges with the heaviest traffic loads most in need of repair here.

Among the 10 busiest bridges deemed structurally deficient in the state, several are in the Atlanta metro. They are:

• Fulton County, 137,730 daily crossings, I-285 over South Utoy Creek
• Cobb County, 79,670 crossings, I-285 over Ramp I-285C to I-75 NBl and I-285 over Rmp I-285 Ccbl to I-75S
• DeKalb County, 31,650 crossings, Ponce De Leon over Lullwater Creek

The 2019 bridge report found there are more than 47,000 bridges rated “structurally deficient” and in urgent need of repairs. Americans cross these bridges — which were built an average of 62 years ago — 178 million times a day.

“If placed end-to-end, they would stretch nearly 1,100 miles — the distance between Chicago and Houston,” the report stated.

While that number may sound like a lot, the total number of structurally deficient bridges has fallen by about 1 percentage point since 2014 to 7.6 percent. And it would take decades to repair them all.

“At this rate, it would take over 80 years to make the significant repairs needed on these structures,” the report stated.

Some of the notable bridges deemed structurally deficient include:

• New York’s Brooklyn Bridge
• Memorial Bridge connecting Washington, D.C. with Arlington, Virginia
• San Mateo-Hayward bridge crossing California’s San Francisco Bay – the longest bridge in the state.
• Robert S. Maestri Bridge over Lake Pontchartrain in Louisiana
• Albemarle Sound Bridge and the Lindsay C. Warren Bridge crossing the Alligator River in North Carolina
• Florida’s Pensacola Bay Bridge
• Vicksburg Bridge in Mississippi
• Lacey V. Murrow Memorial Bridge in Washington state

Rhode Island had the highest percentage of structurally deficient bridges at 23 percent. West Virginia, Iowa, South Dakota and Pennsylvania rounded out the top five.

According to the Federal Highway Administration’s website, the definition of structurally deficient was changed in 2018. The new definition limits the classification to bridges where one key structural element, such as the deck, superstructure, substructure or culverts, was rated in poor or worse condition. All of the data above, including those for previous years, uses the new definition.

Patch national staffer Dan Hampton contributed to this report.