Remembering the Collapse of the Thruway Bridge Over Schoharie Creek

When traveling to Albany and points south, on the New York State Thruway (I-90), I cross Schoharie Creek. This is a special bridge because it was here on Sunday April 5, 1987 at 10:50 AM that the former bridge collapsed killing 10 people. The 25th anniversary of this event was remembered in the link shown below. The collapse was caused by scouring of the bridge pier foundations during a flood event. This is a special bridge for me too, as the collapse of the bridge began a chain reaction from Thruway, State and Federal transportation officials to assure the safety of bridges constructed over streams and rivers. As a water resources engineer with only 10 years out of school with a couple of degrees, and some experience with hydraulic modeling and bridge scour, I didn’t understand how much this event would influence my career until many years later. Within a couple years after the event, the Thruway sought to conduct investigations of all their bridges over streams and rivers. They divided the Thruway into three sections, my company, Bergmann Associates, was selected to study all the bridges west of MP 310, (near Waterloo, NY) and I became the project manager of that study. I investigated the scour vulnerability of the I-90 bridges over many of our western NY streams including: Fall Brook, Canandaigua Outlet, Genesee River, Black Creek, Tonawanda Creek, Niagara River, Cattaraugus Creek and others. All engineers, but particularly those who work in or with the public sector, have a great responsibility to assure the safety of the public and in the case of highways and bridges, the traveling public. When we evaluate or design a highway, bridge, dam or other feature we take upon ourselves the responsibility for the lives of people who will use that facility now and in the future. This is why, in the chaos of work, we must never lose sight of those people who will be affected for better or worse by our decisions and actions. Even in the late 1980’s there was a lack of fully understanding the mechanism of bridge scour, and there was a lack of attention to the many scour critical bridges that posed a threat to the public. In light of what I now understand about bridge scour, this is astonishing and frightening. In my work on the Thruway bridges our team found significant design and maintenance deficiencies that we would not dream of allowing today. This is why we must never take the “know it all” attitude, but rather always approach our work with a measure of ignorance. There’s no way that I could have known when I was a college student, the significance of my training and how important that training would become for me later in life. Although I did not leave college with all the tools I would eventually need to study and design bridges to assure their safety from scour, I left with a solid enough foundation so that I could learn to address these problems. I completed my education believing in the basics of water resources engineering, and that I would someday use what I believed in to bless people but not seeing exactly how those skills would be used. This is why believing is seeing. Believing enables us to see what we could not otherwise see. http://www.timesunion.com/local/article/25-years-ago-the-bridge-was-gone-3460076.php