Road Rage

On a crisp October morning, Farhad Rastegari steered his state-issued Honda Civic onto the Expressway, heading north out of town. Rastegari is in charge of the Massachusetts Highway Department’s bridge inspections, and he and I were on our way to watch one of his teams at work near the Assembly Square mall on the Somerville–East Boston line.

Well before the bridge in Minneapolis collapsed into the Mississippi River in August, injecting genuine urgency into what, up to then, had been a rather sleepy national debate on the condition of our infrastructure, the roads and bridges in Massachusetts were a source of considerable anxiety. Having grown accustomed to holding our breath whenever we crossed the Tobin or used the Ted Williams Tunnel, a lot of us assumed that if a major bridge were going to go tumbling down into a river, there was a good chance it was going to happen right here. We’d already seen falling tiles crush to death a woman driving through a brand-new tunnel. We’d already gotten used to splashing our way through the leaking Big Dig, already read more than we’d ever cared to know about the 550 or so bridges in Massachusetts carrying that terrifying designation “structurally deficient.” In the past few years, in other words, we’d all become more aware of just how much is riding on Rastegari’s work.

As he and I approached Exit 29, Rastegari, a gentle man of 51 who was born in Iran and moved to the United States in 1980, signaled right and circled down the off-ramp. It turned out that the bridge we’d come to see was actually an elevated section of the southbound Expressway, which used to extend through downtown Boston but now, of course, leads across the Zakim Bridge and down under the city. Rastegari parked in a gated lot beneath the highway. Around the perimeter were mounds of salt and sand for the coming winter storms, and at the base of one of the mounds a homeless person had set up camp, a few articles of his tattered clothing strung across a ladder.

Spanning it all was bridge B-16-281. Built in 1970, and measuring 364 feet long and 70 feet wide, it’s one of the approximately 5,000 bridges in Massachusetts that are longer than 20 feet and therefore, under federal guidelines, must be inspected every two years. It had last been checked on October 3, 2005, almost exactly two years earlier.

Raising his voice to be heard over the cars speeding above, Rastegari told me that there are three major sections of a bridge that must be inspected. Gesturing toward what appeared to be a run of corrugated steel, he pointed out the underside of the bridge’s deck, which consisted of “stay in place” forms over which reinforced concrete was poured and asphalt was then laid. The deck rested upon the superstructure—steel beams sitting on enormous concrete blocks—which, in turn, lay atop the substructure, concrete pillars that were sunk into the ground.

Inspectors give each section a grade between a 9 (which indicates new) and a zero. If any section scores a 4 or below, the bridge is classified as structurally deficient. Though that sounds worrisome, “By no means does that mean the bridge is unsafe,” Rastegari said. What it does mean is that the bridge must be checked more often.

Flipping through the report from the last inspection, Rastegari saw that both the deck and the superstructure had received a 7, a good score that, it dawned on me, might have had something to do with MassHighway showing this bridge to me. The substructure, however, had been judged only a 5. It was difficult to understand why, since the pillars appeared to be in decent shape. Rastegari explained the grade by showing me photos from the previous inspection. In those pictures, the concrete pillars were beginning to crumble, exposing the steel rebar inside. Since then, the pillars had been repaired and today looked almost new. “The five now, it might get changed to a six or seven because of the repairs,” Rastegari said. This news seemed to genuinely cheer him.

Approaching us then, wearing hardhats and orange safety vests, were bridge inspectors Tom Prendergast and Pradip Shah. Together, they compose one of the 16 inspection crews that MassHighway deploys across the state. Prendergast, binoculars hanging from his neck, had been checking other fixes made since the last inspection. “They did all the repairs,” he said, “and they’re excellent.” Again, this appeared to be something of a pleasant surprise. I asked Rastegari why the repairs were such a big deal. Wasn’t that the point of checking the bridges in the first place?

You’d think so, but in fact the bridge inspectors simply prepare their report and then turn it in to the director of whichever of the state’s five highway districts the bridge sits in. The director forwards the file to the district’s maintenance division, which prioritizes the order of the repairs. Since each district has a limited maintenance budget, and the majority of repairs are performed by private subcontractors, there is no telling how long it will be until a given bridge is fixed. “The inspectors sometimes get discouraged,” Rastegari said. “They come back two years later and the problem is the same—and it’s gotten worse.”

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