To the editor:

The 2024 Mount Hope Bridge biennial inspection report recently released by RITBA is sobering. It documents extensive corrosion in structural members of our nearly 100-year-old bridge. Yet RITBA’s Director of Engineering, Eric Seabury, has characterized the findings as “all pretty routine.”

That is not reassuring. It is misleading.

These are the same assurances we have heard before: the bridge is safe and concerns are being addressed. But the public now has access to information withheld for over a year. Why? RITBA improperly designated the safety inspection report as Sensitive Security Information, unnecessarily eroding public trust.

What did the 2022, 2020 and 2018 inspection reports show? What action did RITBA take? Was there a preventative maintenance program? If so, why has the list of priority items grown so substantially? The public deserves answers—and the release of those reports, the interim inspection conducted this winter and the updated cable inspection report.

The most serious unresolved issue involves the bridge’s main suspension cables. The 2024 inspection did not include an internal inspection of the cables. The last, conducted in 2015, found a significant number of broken wires due to corrosion, reducing the estimated safety factor from 2.95 to 2.62. The minimum permissible value was 2.15. RITBA had acknowledged that continued corrosion could reduce the safety factor below the acceptable limit within only a few years without corrective action.

More than a decade has now passed. An updated cable inspection is finally underway. The public must see these critical results and the revised factor of safety.

RITBA’s description of these findings as “routine” is deeply troubling. We are told that priority items from the 2024 report are “being designed as part of a larger repair package which will go out for bid later this year.” Nearly two years will have passed before work begins on identified priority deficiencies.

This is the consequence of Rhode Island’s long-standing approach to infrastructure: defer comprehensive maintenance until problems become emergencies or enough deficiencies accumulate to justify a massive capital project.

That approach is dangerous. A bridge does not need one catastrophic failure to become unusable. Multiple deteriorating components can reach a critical point simultaneously. As the Washington Bridge demonstrated, conditions can deteriorate rapidly, leading to emergency restrictions or closure.

The Army Corps of Engineers recognized this risk when it concluded that replacing the Cape Cod bridges was preferable to endless rehabilitation of aging infrastructure that would ultimately fail.

Similarly, RITBA should establish an independent commission of bridge engineers to evaluate the inspection findings and determine whether continued rehabilitation is technically and economically justified.
More importantly, an independent feasibility study for full replacement must begin immediately.

The Mount Hope Bridge is well beyond its design life and functionally obsolete. Built for pre-World War II traffic, it now carries more than 7 million vehicles annually. It has one lane in each direction, no breakdown lanes, no dedicated emergency or bus lanes, no bicycle or pedestrian lanes, no suicide protection and strict weight limits.

Massachusetts DOT and the Army Corps of Engineers have demonstrated that public outreach, planning, permitting, design and construction can be completed in 12 to 15 years—not the 20 to 25 years RITBA management has suggested.

The choice is clear: begin planning or wait until a crisis forces action on someone else’s timetable.

We may be one inspection away from a finding that could force an emergency shutdown of this critical transportation link. The time to begin planning for the future of the Mount Hope Bridge is now.

Steve Ruggieri and Nick Landekic, Mount Hope Bridge Watch Group
Bristol