The bridge inspector fired Monday by the Arkansas Department of Transportation for failing to discover a crack in the Interstate 40 bridge over the Mississippi River was responsible for overseeing inspections of nine "fracture critical" bridges throughout the state, the department confirmed Thursday.
One of those bridges, the heavily traveled Hernando de Soto Bridge crossing the Mississippi River into Memphis, has been closed since a routine inspection on May 11 found a significant crack that experts say should have been found sooner.
Former statewide bridge inspector Monty Frazier led a team of inspectors that missed the developing fracture in a steel support beam during consecutive annual inspections in September 2019 and September 2020. The eight other bridges Frazier oversaw are scattered throughout the state. Three are in Fort Smith and the rest are in Des Arc, Eureka Springs, Helena-West Helena, Little Rock and Newport, according to data provided by the Transportation Department.
The department is reinspecting those bridges and has been "knocking them out pretty fast," agency spokesman Dave Parker said Thursday.
Michael Hill, the department's heavy bridge maintenance engineer, recommended that Frazier be fired for dereliction of duty, according to an internal memo obtained by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. The memo is addressed to Steve Frisbee, the department's assistant chief engineer for operations.
"Mr. Frazier, neglecting his responsibilities to follow proper fracture critical inspection techniques by getting within arm's length of the outside of the tie girder, was why the crack was not discovered [sooner]," Hill said in the memo.
Frazier told his superiors that it was unsafe to conduct an up-close inspection underneath the bridge, Hill wrote, but "standard practice" is for the inspection crew to get close enough, via safe suspension from the bridge itself, to check for cracks like the one in question, the memo said.
In a Sunday email to Rex Vines, the Arkansas Transportation Department's deputy director and chief engineer, Hill said he was aware of potential pressure on department leadership to fire him.
"You don't have to worry that I'm going to do something that hurts the program even more on my way out," Hill wrote. "I want the program to come back stronger from this experience and I want my team to succeed. Even if I'm no longer part of it."
Rita Looney, the department's chief legal counsel, emailed the assistant U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas on Monday asking about a potential criminal investigation after the Transportation Department's own investigation. Assistant U.S. Attorney Shannon Smith responded that she had passed along the message within the department.
Aside from the failures of Frazier's team, agency officials said the incident had also exposed flaws in the Transportation Department's processes, which leaders said would be fixed by building more redundancies into inspections.
Frazier started working for the Transportation Department as a mechanic in November 2006. His pay started at $25,766 per year, and as he moved up, his pay increased almost every year until his salary reached $74,984 after a raise in July 2020, according to department records.
Frazier's highest level of education is a 1988 high school diploma, and he worked as a heavy equipment operator and welder in Arkansas and Alaska before joining the Transportation Department, according to his job application.
The other fracture critical bridges inspected by Frazier's crew were:
• The Arkansas 367 Newport Memorial Bridge over the White River in Newport.
• The Arkansas 187 Beaver Bridge over Table Rock Lake in Eureka Springs.
• The U.S. 49 Helena Bridge over the Mississippi River in Helena-West Helena.
• The Interstate 540 Arkansas River Bridge in Fort Smith.
• The Arkansas 38 Des Arc Bridge over the White River in Des Arc.
• The U.S. 71 bridge over the Arkansas River in Fort Smith.
• The U.S. 64 West Fort Smith Bridge over the Arkansas River in Fort Smith.
• The Broadway Bridge over the Arkansas River in Little Rock.
FRACTURE, REPAIRS
The traffic volume on the I-40 bridge to Memphis ranges from about 41,000 vehicles daily, according to the Arkansas Department of Transportation, up to 60,000, according to the Tennessee Department of Transportation. Much of the traffic is long-haul trucks carrying freight between Memphis and Dallas. The 3.3-mile, six-lane bridge first opened in 1973.
Highway officials have declined this week to give a solid timeline of when the bridge will reopen, suggesting that it could take "several months."
Gary Prinz, an associate professor of civil engineering at the University of Arkansas, has regularly provided expert advice to the state Transportation Department. The crack on the I-40 bridge formed from "metal fatigue," the result of decades of supporting loads of daily traffic, Prinz told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Bridges are designed with future metal fatigue in mind because inspections should catch its impact, he said. A crack in the metal starts to grow "in an unstable manner" once it reaches a certain length, which engineers can calculate based on the strength of the material, he said.
"Had the crack been caught before it became critical, it would probably not be necessary to shut down the bridge," Prinz said.
The fracture in the nearly 50-year-old crossing is along a 900-foot-long steel beam on one of the spans.
The Tennessee Department of Transportation released its plans for a two-phase repair process in a Thursday news release. In phase one, engineers will install steel plates on each side of the fractured beam to hold the equipment necessary for the repairs. In phase two, engineers will remove and replace the damaged piece of steel.
Tennessee selected Kiewit Corp. of Omaha, Neb., to do the repairs.
Prinz said it would be safest for the bridge to remain closed until the repair process is complete, and he called it "abnormal" for a crack of that size to go unnoticed for so many years.
Photos from August 2016, taken by a kayaker on the Mississippi River, show that the crack was already forming back then, according to a report from The Associated Press. State officials have not confirmed or denied that the crack had already begun forming five years ago.
The kayaker, 64-year-old Barry Moore, sent the photos to the Arkansas and Tennessee transportation agencies. The two departments share ownership of the bridge.
The Tennessee department is conducting an inspection this week of the bridge on Interstate 55 between Memphis and West Memphis, the alternate route now used by much of the usual I-40 traffic. A spokeswoman for the Tennessee department said the I-55 review could take until early next week.
Besides I-55, the closest bridge over the Mississippi River is U.S. 49 through Helena-West Helena, about 75 miles south of Memphis.
Avoiding the I-40 bridge is increasing transportation costs for several industries. The Arkansas Trucking Association estimated last week that rerouting traffic would cost $2.4 million per day.
River barge traffic underneath the I-40 bridge was paused May 11 and resumed May 14. A longer pause could have had a negative impact on the grain market since the Mississippi River is a major conduit for agricultural commerce, according to a news release from the University of Arkansas System's Division of Agriculture.
"We could have seen price impacts, with markets north of the bridge/river closure seeing prices fall because of excess supply and markets south of the bridge/river closure experiencing price increases due to excess demand to lower supply," agricultural economist Andrew McKenzie said in the news release.
The Arkansas Farm Bureau had "not seen a major impact on the Arkansas agricultural supply chain" as of Wednesday, Director of Commodity Activities and Economics Mark Lambert said in a statement, but he said the bureau will monitor the progress of repairing the bridge.
Correspondence from high-level officials in the Arkansas Department of Transportation obtained this week showed how they scrambled to alert the public and government officials to the compromised bridge.
The bridge shutdown began after the inspectors who discovered the fracture called 911 on May 11.
Later that afternoon, Transportation Department Director Lorie Tudor sent messages to Gov. Asa Hutchinson, Arkansas' congressional delegation and members of the Arkansas State Highway Commission apprising them of the "significant failure" on the bridge and that it had been shut down.
"Best case scenario -- an emergency contract to repair the bridge will be necessary," she wrote. "Worst case scenario -- replace the river spans of the bridge. Thank goodness it was caught before a catastrophic failure with loss of life. The news media is already aware. This will make national news."