A look back at some of this week’s top stories:
I-5 Bridge listed as ‘fracture critical’
Both spans of the Interstate 5 Bridge over the Columbia River are considered “fracture critical” by the Oregon Department of Transportation, meaning if one crucial part of the bridge sustains a big enough blow, the bridge could collapse.
It’s a designation the bridge shares with many bridges in both Oregon and Washington, as well as the I-5 Skagit River Bridge that collapsed Thursday evening. The Oregon Department of Transportation, which is tasked with maintaining the I-5 Bridge between Portland and Vancouver, has released a fact sheet about Oregon’s bridges following Thursday’s nonfatal bridge collapse.
In it, the I-5 Columbia River bridge is categorized as a bridge without safety redundancies or backups that would prevent it from collapsing if part of a bridge truss is damaged or removed.
“If one of the fracture-critical pieces is somehow taken out, removed or fails in some way, the whole bridge could collapse,” Oregon transportation spokesman Don Hamilton said Tuesday. He declined to specify where the bridge would need to be damaged in order to collapse, because he didn’t want to make the bridge’s weak spots public.