Because inquiring minds want to know, we sat down with RITBA Director of Engineering Eric Seabury and Executive Director Lori Caron Silveira to discuss the 2024 Mt. Hope Bridge inspection report — what it means, and what RITBA is doing (or has already done) to address its findings.

While Seabury and Caron Silveira are not at liberty to discuss pending litigation filed by the Town of Bristol, they were able to discuss the inspection report and explain the process RITBA uses to keep the bridges under its oversight safe.

The bottom line, according to Seabury: The findings in the 530-page report are not unusual for a bridge of Mt. Hope’s age.

“All of it is typical of pretty much any inspection report you’ll find on a structure of this age,” said Seabury. “It’s all pretty routine.”

When RITBA receives an inspection report, the first step is a debrief with the inspection consultant, who walks officials through the findings and identifies the items that need the most attention.

“They’ll come in here and walk us through all the items,” said Seabury. “They have a list of recommended action items for every part of the bridge.”

Those items are prioritized based on urgency, ranging from priority repairs to routine maintenance. Routine items include work that will eventually be needed, such as repainting areas where protective coatings are beginning to deteriorate.

Other findings are classified as maintenance items that can be handled by RITBA’s own staff, which includes about 17 maintenance employees.
“Maintenance gets right on all the stuff we can do in house so that we can check it all off,” said Seabury.

More significant repairs are incorporated into design projects and sent out for public bid. The priority items identified in the 2024 inspection report are currently being designed as part of a larger repair package.
“For instance, right now we’ve got all of the priority items that are in this report in design currently with a consultant and they’re putting together a whole package to address all of them,” said Seabury. “It’ll go out to bid. It’ll be probably a couple million dollar project because of the access that’s required to get under the bridge. A lot of the cost is getting access.”

Because accessing parts of the bridge can be one of the most expensive parts of the work, RITBA often uses those opportunities to address less urgent maintenance issues at the same time.

“If there’s a priority item here and also a routine maintenance item, and you have access to it, fix it as well because it makes sense,” said Seabury. “Outside of that, we can plan the rest of the repairs for other times, as you can only spend so much money at a time. So that’s how you have to prioritize everything.”

Lower-priority repairs and anticipated future work are incorporated into RITBA’s long-term capital plan.

“We sit with the consultants every time we get the report and we get a debrief. So long before the full report has been prepared, we’re very well aware of what’s in it,” said Seabury. “We’re in tune with our bridges.”

While the full inspection report is hundreds of pages long, Seabury said the action items can be distilled into a much shorter list organized by sections of the bridge — including the south approach spans, main spans, north approach spans, substructure and deck.

That process also allows RITBA to quickly determine whether a finding requires immediate attention.

“So if, during the debrief, they say ‘we found this one particular stringer that has a crack and it should be repaired with a shim,’ my immediate question is, ‘Is this an emergency?’ and they would say ‘Nope, it’s not an emergency,’” said Seabury.

“That’s the type of thing that benefits from having that communication with the consultant. They knew to call right away, and if it’s something that needs to be addressed in the short term, our procurement rules allow us to pick up the phone and call anybody we need to to come up and fix something.”

But when a repair is not considered an emergency, RITBA must follow the public bidding and procurement procedures required of a quasi-public agency.

“When it’s not considered an emergency, we have to follow certain procedures as a quasi-public agency, which we do,” said Seabury. “But we do it expediently.”

Bridge classification
The federal government receives all the data from the inspections and the rating of the bridge is listed and reviewed and it’s in the National Bridge Inventory. The Mt. Hope Bridge is classified as fair. There used to be more than three categories, now it’s good, fair, or poor. When there were more categories, this bridge was rated as satisfactory.

It dropped to fair at this most recent inspection with a note from the consultant saying the only reason it dropped was because of a noted scour condition at one of the piers from the last underwater inspection report.

"So basically what they’re saying is all of the rest of the bridge we still consider satisfactory but because the bridge as a whole can’t rate any higher than the lowest rating of a major component, it had to be classified as fair.

“We hired an underwater inspection firm to go back out and do a new inspection to verify if the scour condition still exists because with the tides and currents, things can change underwater all the time. and they do,” said Seabury. “They found no scour issue.”

They were hoping to upgrade back to satisfactory, but in the interim, federal guidelines changes and there’s only three categories now: good, fair, and poor. “So, we’re going to stay in the fair category because to get into the good category with a 96-year-old bridge is probably almost impossible. And fair is fine, and probably covers the vast majority of bridges,” said Seabury.

2024 inspection action items
These items were addressed following a debrief with the bridge inspector, well before the formal inspection report was compiled in March 2025.

• Cracked I-beam web: A shim was installed where the end of an I-beam stringer had a crack in the web. (Completed last year.)

• Pier column drainage: Inspectors found a pocket at the base of a pier column where water was collecting, creating a potential future corrosion issue. A drainage hole was drilled by the internal maintenance team shortly after the issue was identified.

• Cable saddle bolts: Inspectors identified several broken, missing or corroded bolts at cable saddles — locations where the main cables change direction near the roadway level and at the tops of the towers. Repairs are being completed as part of the ongoing dehumidification project. Seabury noted that the issue does not pose an immediate safety concern because of the bridge’s built-in redundancy. “There’s a lot of redundancy in the bridge in general,” said Seabury. “A missing anchor bolt on a bearing, when there are hundreds on this bridge, is not cause for concern. We fix it, but it is not something that could cause the bridge to fail.”

• Catwalk deterioration: Inspectors identified areas of deterioration on the catwalk beneath the bridge. Officials were already aware of the issue and have installed barriers to prevent personnel from using the compromised areas. No additional repairs are planned at this time.

• Roadway potholes and asphalt overlay: A new asphalt overlay has been installed, and pothole repairs are continuing as needed. “That’s just going to be ongoing until the deck gets replaced in less than five years,” said Seabury.

A capital plan
Items the RITBA team were not able to take action on right away with their in-house crews are currently being incorporated into the capital plan, which is almost finalized.

“Because we go through periodic capital plan updates, we gave it to one of our own consultants that has that talent within their staff to do capital plans and said, ‘Review all these reports, plug all of the recommendations into a capital plan.’ In fact, we had an update meeting (last week) on it and and it’s a very comprehensive capital plan. There’s steel repair contracts in there, there’s painting contracts, basically all fed by our inspection reports,” said Seabury.

Once finalized, the plan goes to RITBA’s CFO and he’ll give it to his finance consultant who will come up with a plan to finance all the projects included in the plan. “The finance consultant will take a look and then we’ll have to make some changes, push a non-priority project a couple years out if it helps the finance plan,” said Seabury. “Once that all gets done, it’ll go to our board, which will formally approve it.” At that point RIBTA will share the plan publicly.

Priority items in design
Several repair projects identified in the 2024 inspection are now in the design phase and will be bundled into a public construction contract in the coming months.

The work includes replacing deteriorated anchor bolts and nuts, repairing leaking deck joints, fixing cracked connection plates and stringers, rehabilitating bearings at the main towers, repairing gusset plates and lateral bracing, patching cracked and spalled concrete beneath the safety walk, and replacing three cracked light bases.
Seabury said many of the repairs involve isolated problems on a bridge with hundreds of similar structural components.

One example is a missing bearing fill plate on a single stringer. There are 26 joints on the bridge, with seven stringers at each joint on both sides — about 364 stringer locations in all.

"It's nothing that's going to cause the bridge to fall down," Seabury said. "But yes, of course we're going to repair it."

Similarly, inspectors found a handful of connection plates with corrosion-induced hairline cracks.

"Corrosion-induced usually means an area of the plate corrodes down to a certain thickness and develops a thin hairline crack," Seabury said. "You go out there, bolt a new plate over it, seal it up and paint it."

Replacing leaking deck joints is another priority because it helps prevent future corrosion.

"That's a given on every bridge in the country," Seabury said. "If you fix it, it reduces corrosion."

Inspectors also identified one hinge bearing that was no longer moving properly.

"The goal is to get that bearing operational again so that it slides and allows the bridge to move the way it needs to," he said.

Other work focuses on improving drainage around the bridge's main towers. Water entering through the bridge's finger joints had been difficult to channel away because drainage troughs underneath were hard to access.

"We've since designed a better clean-out system," Seabury said. "Now our maintenance crews can get onto that scaffolding and water-jet the troughs out from the sides."

Seabury said many of the repairs are being grouped into a single construction project because contractors will already have access to otherwise difficult-to-reach areas.

"Lateral bracing angles are not major members, but they do help," he said. "It's not going to cause a problem with the bridge, but it's listed as a priority item."

The remainder of the inspection report consists primarily of routine maintenance recommendations.

‘Bridgephobia’
Seabury and Caron Silveira say they understand why residents are nervous. After the Washington Bridge closure, every inspection report is viewed through a different lens. But Caron Silveira thinks there might be another issue contributing to some people’s skepticism of RIBTA’s transparency.

The availability of federal money in recent years required RITBA to create a case for why they should be the recipients of these competitive infrastructure grants.

“We walked a fine line in our grant proposals between making a compelling case to the government to get this money to address the corrosion with the de-humidification system, without scaring the daylights out of everyone,” said Caron Silveira.

“One of the photos was specifically of the back stage cables where it entered one of the anchorage points…when they unwrapped this location, there were many visibly broken wires. That’s one of the photos we used in the grant application,” said Seabury. “But the vast majority of those cables were repaired. Basically, we pulled all the tension back where it needed to be and closed it up. But that’s the photo we used to say, ‘Hey, our bridge needs the money.’ But at the same token, people were going, ‘Oh my God.’”

Inspections ongoing
A new detailed cable inspection is underway as part of the current dehumidification project, allowing inspectors to examine the bridge while scaffolding and equipment are already in place.

"We have scaffolding up, the contractor is working, they're unwrapping cable, they're wrapping cable. It's a perfect time to do a detailed inspection, and the goal is to establish a new safety factor that will become our new baseline," said Seabury.

Regardless of the results, he said, the bridge's cables must continue to be maintained.

"Either way, we still have to dehumidify those cables. Even if we said, 'Well, time for a new bridge,' you're 20 to 25 years away from having one. So what do you have to do? You have to maintain this bridge.
"So we're doing both at the same time, and we're confident we're going to come out fine on the safety factor."

Routine bridge inspections are required every two years, but Seabury said RITBA also performs interim inspections between those reviews.
"That gives you the level of comfort you need to say, 'Things haven't progressed. Nothing unexpected has happened. You're still good.' It's a good practice, especially on a bridge this age."

He said RITBA expects interim inspections to become standard practice between every required inspection.