Joe:
Do you really want to know just how influential SBYnews is. Do you remember the Rt. 50 overhead bridge whereby you displayed photos of a hole that had formed and fell through the entire blacktop & pan decking below. Then - right after your posting - I called to your attention about how bad the road infrastructure was throughout the Country and used the example of my experience when I worked for a large A&E firm in Norfolk, VA. In the article I mentioned that a young engineer asked me to pull off the side of the road one day as he wanted to show me the underside of an underpass in Norfolk, VA. In the article I went on to describe how the VA Department of Transportation had received numerous calls from passing motorist about cracked windshields as a result of concrete falling from the overpasses and that as a temporary stopgap measure the VA Department of Transportation had installed plywood and just layer it across the steel eye beams to protect motorist from the disintegrating bridge.
Right after I posted the article one of SBYnews readers went back to the Rt. 50 drawbridge in Salisbury and took photographs of where the Maryland Department of Transportation had used the same technique and these were published on SBYnews. Some even said the homeless had made homes upthere.
Well after all of SBYnews publicity - within a month or two after your article was published the Maryland Department of Transportation initiated a huge bridge renovation which is still going on. The project has been going on for more than a year now at that exact location where SBYnews exposed - and is still going on. I get a chuckle every time I pass over the bridge and I inform my wife that if it wasn't for SBYnews the condition would most likely have still gone unchecked.
Thank you again SBYnews for helping to make Salisbury's roads much safer to traverse. I congratulate you on impeccable reporting.
Beazer
9 comments:
ahhhh, the power of the people!!
greg wiltbank from willards is in charge of all bridges for the s.h. a. not doing his job??
I remember the story. SBYnews had a photograph of the pothole that had collapsed at that location.
Now it all comes back to me.
lol I remember that story very well. I also think about it going over that bridge
I don't know exactly how much the State has spent at that location - but it has to be a fortune. The contractor & crew have been working there for more than a year now. At Davis-Bacon scale - it must be at least a million or so.
I do not remember the picture or story.
A million??? LOL!!! You can ATLEAST double that. You should be able to go one the States website and look at the contract award amount to see exactly what the amount is. A million would not even touch the amount of work going on there I'm sure.
People please, these projects are in the works for years. Credit to Sbynews for the job they do, but the state was going to rehab the bridge story or no story.
To 8:38 Posting:
Give credit to where credit is due.
Maybe the bridge would have been refurbished by the State anyway.
But after SBYnews exposed the photos and that gapping hole and the Rt. 50 roadway below - I'll bet my bottom dollar that the State moved it up on its list of priorities.
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