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Each time Bojidar Yanev, a city transportation engineer, inspects a bridge, he takes along a camera just in case anyone back at the office doubts the structural horrors he describes to them. He also brings along a hard hat.
"What I see sometimes, it scares me," he said. This time, what scared him was a major cross-beam that had rusted loose from an 85-foot column that holds up the Queens Midtown Viaduct.
That's the one that carries six lanes of the Long Island Expressway into the Midtown Tunnel. For decades after their construction, most of the bridges in the city - those that span the great waterways, the viaducts that carry expressways, and the hundreds of smaller ones that jump over streets and railroad tracks - were simply left alone. Until recent years, inspections were rarely made. Maintenance wasn't much of a bother.
As a result of the neglect, New York's bridges are falling down. The city Department of Transportation, now trying desperately to catch up on repairs, has moved into a triage situation that is expected to cost between $10 billion and $15 billion over the next 10 years. Critically wounded bridges will be partially closed and repaired at once; mortally wounded ones will be scrapped altogether and replaced. The epicenter of the new improvements, DOT officials warn, will be Long Island City in Queens. There, a total of nine...