They've become some of the most talked about images in Rhode Island.

Photos of broken anchor rods on the westbound Washington Bridge taken in December of 2023.

(cars whooshing) It led to the emergency closure of the westbound bridge and triggered further evaluation.

Its traffic was offloaded onto the newer eastbound bridge.

A report by engineering consultants delivered three months after the shutdown found a laundry list of deficiencies.

The next day, governor Dan McKee announced the bridge needed to be demolished and rebuilt.

- We will now move forward with a replacement of this bridge in the safest and most expedient way possible.

- [Michelle] Many of the problems with the bridge relate to what's called the post tensioning system.

Steel cables called tendons run through ducts in concrete.

- The cables kind of act like a rubber band that squeezes the concrete and keeps it in place.

- [Michelle] David Lattanzi is an Associate Professor at George Mason University.

He's a former bridge engineer and inspector.

One issue he says is that many important components of this kind of bridge are buried in concrete.

- You're trying to look inside these ducts to see what is going on, but visually we can't inspect them and so we need to use other technologies to verify that we've got a good seal or whether or not there's water inside.

And this has been a longstanding problem for those kinds of components.

- [Michelle] The bridge opened to traffic in the late 1960s and while its closure was a shock to Rhode Islanders, corrosion in post tension tendons is not a new issue in the world of bridge engineering.

It's a problem that's been known for decades.

- These post tension ducts and especially at this era, became something that engineers across the country have dealt with.

It was just really hard at that time because you could create an air gap in the duct and you can't see it.

- [Michelle] Back in 1999, a bridge in the Florida Keys was found to have a post tension tendon failure caused by corrosion.

The tendon went on to be replaced.

Other bridges in Florida as well as Pennsylvania, Virginia, Minnesota, Indiana, South Carolina, have also had these kinds of problems according to a report by the Federal Highway Administration.

And now we can add Rhode Island to the list.

- If anything happens to that post tensioning cable or rod that in terms of fracture or corrosion, that you can have a very sudden failure.

- [Michelle] Andrew Smith is a professor of civil engineering and engineering mechanics at Columbia University.

- You can also have just weakening if there's cracks or other deterioration or the grout that's holding the post-tensioning cable.

It just allows a sort of relaxation and then you run the risk of a sort of sudden catastrophic failure.

- We asked RIDOT, the Rhode Island Department of Transportation for an interview with director Peter Alviti.

A spokesman declined our requests citing the ongoing lawsuit the state filed against 13 companies that did work related to the bridge.

When we followed up and asked RIDOT if the department was aware of tendon failures in post tensioned bridges across the country, a spokesman again declined to answer because of the litigation.

According to the state's lawsuit, engineering firms failed to identify red flags that compromise the structural safety and integrity of the bridge.

Attorneys representing Rhode Island also say, "Issues with the post tensioning system were first brought to the state's attention back in 1992, which included concerns about corrosion from moisture and salts exposure."

- A contractor who's being sued as part of this lawsuit... - [Michelle] Kansas based engineer, Casey Jones, has been following the abrupt bridge closure from the start.

He's released more than two dozen YouTube videos on the Washington Bridge.

- Rhode Island DOT's Bridge Inspection manual says that the ultimate responsibility for conducting and documenting these bridge inspections lies with Rhode Island DOT.

I'm sure if there's some culpability with the design consultants that should be exposed and investigated, but the main person in charge is Rhode Island DOT.

- [Michelle] The engineers we spoke with, say RIDOT could have been monitoring the post tensioning components for years using special inspection methods.

- That means that you're gonna watch this thing and you're going to use more advanced technologies and you're going to increase the frequency of the inspections as a result as well.

- [Michelle] Lattanzi and others point to bridge inspection technologies that operate like an x-ray and offer an internal scan of bridge components.

Detecting issues like bad grouting and pockets of moisture.

- The broad term that we use for this kind of thing is what's known as non-destructive evaluation or non-destructive testing.

Sometimes we call this NDE.

And that's a blanket term for any kind of special non-visual technique that we use to assess a structure.

The two that are the most common are something called ground penetrating radar, which is just what it sounds like.

It's a way of sending radar pulses that, you know, you bounce back and then they get received.

- [Michelle] The other he says is a magnetic flux leakage, which tests how much magnetism there is in a metal component.

And there are other non-destructive testing techniques that could have been used.

- Definitely a visual inspection should be done, paralleled with non-destructive testing.

- Dana Tawil is a structural engineer and is studying corrosion in concrete bridges as a PhD student at the University of Ottawa.

When should a Department of Transportation start to use some of these techniques, specifically non-destructive evaluation?

- Once there are signs of damage, for example, cracks, spalling, so that's when the concrete, you know, pieces fall off.

It's an alarm that you know it's telling us, okay, the next step should be done, which is the non-destructive tests.

- [Michelle] We asked RIDOT if the department had used any non-destructive evaluation techniques to inspect for corrosion in the post tensioning system prior to the bridge's emergency closure.

A RIDOT spokesman said the department could not answer that citing the ongoing lawsuit.

We also asked RIDOT for a list of special inspections done on the bridge since 2014.

None of the reports they shared included NDE techniques.

Tawil and other engineers say photos from the inspections RIDOT did complete, illustrate how the bridge could have benefited from a non-destructive evaluation.

- When you have this much damage in the structural elements or components around attendance.

I would definitely move forward to do some non-destructive evaluation of the attendance.

- [Michelle] Professor Andrew Bechtel is the chair of the Department of Civil Engineering at the College of New Jersey.

We showed him these photos taken during a 2016 inspection.

He was struck by the amount of corrosion on the beam and the area behind it.

- Water will destroy every civil engineering creation that there is.

We drain the bridge to the abutments, so keeping them clear and controlling the water will ultimately control the corrosion of the abutments.

- The basic issue here is that people weren't putting eyes on certain aspects of the bridge on inspection, after inspection.

And the reason for that should be addressed.

According to the Federal Highway Administration, it's ultimately up to bridge owners, in this case RIDOT, to decide what type of special inspection it conducts.

But again, RIDOT won't say if it did the kind of inspections that could have flagged issues with the post tensioning system sooner.

If the Rhode Island DOT had found out about these issues earlier, could anything have been done to solve the problem?

- One of the problems with this type of component is that it is extremely hard to repair.

They could have done things that would've provided an extra 10 years, 20 years, and what that would've actually done is allowed them to do better capital allocation and better planning for the a new bridge replacement.

- [Michelle] After the bridge was shut down, engineers conducted a non-destructive evaluation to assess the post tensioning tendons.

They found some of the tendons had corroded significantly.

It was one of the many reasons the bridge needed to be demolished.

The bridge was shut down more than 50 years after it opened.

When we asked RIDOT about the life expectancy of the bridge, a spokesman once again said the department could not answer that because of the lawsuit.

RIDOT had already spent 34.5 million dollars rehabilitating the bridge since October of 2021.

A project that was expected to cost a total of $78 million.

It's raised questions about whether repairing an old bridge was a wise use of taxpayer money.

- Foresight would've had me say, you know what?

This is gonna cost us too much money in the long term.

We need to replace it before it becomes an issue.

- [Michelle] Ultimately, Lattanzi says, Rhode Island is extraordinarily lucky that an engineer spotted the broken anchor rods nearly a year and a half ago.

- The tie rods didn't cause a major safety issue, but they triggered a deeper investigation that found a worse issue.

It's kind of the analogy of you go to the doctor because you've got heartburn or something and then that triggers the doctor to do blood work and it comes back that you have some sort of a serious issue and it's only because you went to the doctor for something else that they were able to see you and make that assessment.

- There are important lessons I think, that need to be learned and I don't see any will within the leadership of Rhode Island DOT to answer such questions.