Brooklyn, NY – Brooklyn Bridge Has Lowest Safety Rating In NYC.

Brooklyn, NY – Only three of the 787 bridges maintained by the New York City Department of Transportation are rated in poor condition, and the Brooklyn Bridge — opened in 1883 — is one of them.

Throughout the New York region, state and local authorities have been double-checking the stability of bridges after the collapse of an interstate highway bridge in Minneapolis on Wednesday night.

The latest annual bridge report card for New York City — which covers only the 787 bridges run by the city, not those run by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority or the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey — shows that only three bridges were rated as poor, the lowest rating, in 2006: the Brooklyn Bridge; a pedestrian bridge at East 78th Street over the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive in Manhattan, and a bridge at Willow Lake at 76th Road in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, Queens.

In a conference call with journalists this afternoon, city officials said that the state inspects all of the city’s vehicular bridges every two years. The officials said the heavily trafficked Brooklyn Bridge is safe, despite its poor rating.
“The poor rating for the Brooklyn Bridge means that there’s only components of the bridge that are in poor condition,” said Lori A. Ardito, first deputy commissioner at the city’s Department of Transportation. “They’re actually the ramps leading to the bridge — not the span of the bridge.” [nytimesblog]