The Philadelphia Inquirer reports, “An apparent construction error six decades ago could have caused the fracture discovered Friday [January 20] in a steel beam that forced the closure of the Delaware River Bridge, an engineering expert who viewed pictures of the cracked truss said Sunday. An image of the cracked truss – a supporting piece – on the bridge that runs between Bucks County in Pennsylvania and Burlington County in New Jersey shows signs of holes that had been mistakenly drilled into the steel beam and then filled with plug welds, a typical solution in the 1950s when the bridge was built, said Karl Frank, professor emeritus of engineering at the University of Texas at Austin.”
