Dear Mr. Mayor-elect (or can I call you Bill?): I know you’ve got a lot on your plate, including an enormous budget deficit. But as you decide which city programs shall thive and which shall be slashed, please don’t overlook perhaps the most neglected need: our infrastructure.
As Tuesday’s Daily News reported, 25 of the city’s 29 bridge painters are being laid off in the waning days of the Bloomberg administration. The city Department of Transportation says they are being replaced by temporary workers who’ll be employed from spring through fall — but Bill, this is really your call.
And I am worried.
I started at the city’s DOT in 1971 and was chief engineer in the 1980s. During my tenure, for want of a paint job, in 1973 the elevated West Side Highway came crashing to the ground (weeks later, a 12-year-old boy rode his bike on the still-standing section and plunged to his death when he reached the collapsed portion).
In 1981, a Japanese photographer was killed when two cables on the walkway of the Brooklyn Bridge snapped, becoming multi-ton steel whips that struck him. The culprit: corrosion due to lack of painting and cleaning.
In 1986, half of the Manhattan Bridge was shut, rerouting several subway lines and closing two lanes of traffic, which detoured trucks to the already weakened Williamsburg Bridge. The cause: corrosion of the most sensitive part of a cable suspension bridge — the anchorage, where the cables disappear into a masonry block of concrete. We never told the public how bad it was, but mathematically, the bridge could’ve collapsed into the East River.
In 1988, we did tell the public how bad it was when we closed the Williamsburg Bridge entirely for three months. We found over 400 dangerous conditions — “Red Flags” that meant a failure could have been imminent. Nearly all those flags could’ve been avoided by simple painting and cleaning.
By 1989, after many failures and some fatalities, the Koch administration enacted the most comprehensive bridge maintenance program in this land of old bridges we call the northeast. Every mayor since, from Dinkins to Bloomberg, has kept this program in effect.
But I knew there’d come a day when the past would be forgotten.
I can already hear the response from the city: “We have no money. First, we need to fund education, hospitals, police and so on.”
But if we fail to invest what’s necessary in infrastructure, we will saddle future generations unnecessarily with massive costs. For example, the ratio of replacing a beam vs. maintaining it regularly is as high as 50:1.
So what’s the right formula?
I commissioned a study in 1989 by leading universities to find out. They found that to properly maintain New York City’s 840 bridges, we should have been spending $150 million a year — $50 million for maintenance and $100 million for capital replacement.
In actuality, we were spending $400 million a year — but almost all on capital costs, because bridges were in danger, and hardly anything on maintenance.
The solution, what would save mega-billions of dollars for our children and grandchildren is simple: Use the mop-and-paint technology of last century. Clean the steel regularly to get the highly corrosive salt and bird dung off it and coat it with paint. As one of the greatest bridge engineers of the 20th century, Blair Birdsall said, “The Brooklyn Bridge will last for 1,000 years if we are smart enough to maintain it properly.”
Bill, you will be besieged by many constituencies. There are virtually no constituencies for painting bridges, save a few of us old-timers who were in the trenches decades ago. Here’s an opportunity to spend a little bit of money now to save a lot later. It’s a matter of generational ethics, and maybe also one of life and death.
Schwartz was an engineer with NYC DOT from 1971-1990 and left as chief engineer.
