Jim Taylor
2024-02-09 06:03:08 UTC
Kathy Hochul will not do a damned thing about it. She's too busy
with her black boyfriends.NEW YORK (WRGB) â You've probably never heard of the Graber Report,
but it's vital for your safety.
It's a report on bridge inspection and bridge safety in New York. By
law, it has to be put together every year by NYS Department of
Transportation.
It's done with your tax dollars, or at least it was.
We've now learned that the DOT stopped doing the Graber Report three
years ago, so we started asking questions.
In April of 1987, as flood waters raged through the Schoharie Creek
in Montgomery County, the thruway bridge above the creek collapsed.
Four cars and a tractor trailer plunged into the creek, killing 10
people. It was caused by bridge scour, erosion under and along the
bridge pilings.
In the aftermath of the collapse, the state legislature passed a law
that required a yearly report on bridge inspections in the state,
the Graber Report. The DOT is supposed to submit that report to
state legislature every year, but that stopped in 2020.
That means that the public was left in the dark when it comes to
bridge inspections for the last three years.
We checked with leaders of the NYS Assembly and Senate
Transportation Committees. No one knew why the reports were no
longer being delivered.
One week after we started asking questions at the Capitol, the
Graber Reports for the last three years magically appeared on the
DOT website. Three years of delayed reports were suddenly made
public.
We tracked down NYS Transportation Commissioner Marie Therese
Dominguez as she showed up to testify at a legislative budget
hearing.
âIn all honesty, weâve been working to get out the reports in the
last year here, and we wanted to make sure that we were thorough and
did all of the analysis on the bridge conditions," Commissioner
Dominguez told us. "Our team has been working on it recognizing that
we do have a statutory obligation to get them out, so weâve been
working on it for a while now with all our reports we try to get
them out in a timely way, this one unfortunately slipped."
The DOT and Commissioner Dominguez claimed the COVID-19 pandemic and
resources that were stretched thin caused the delays.
Even before the reports stopped, they changing to have less
information included, and it's clear from the reports that with age,
the condition of some bridges went down.
Commissioner Dominguez had reassurances for state lawmakers at the
hearing saying, "We inspect our bridges every two years, we have
eyes on them, we want to make sure that they're safe."
When we asked Commissioner Dominguez if she could promise us that
future Graber Reports would come out on time, she said, "We'll make
every effort to make sure we do that. The department is very
conscientious and transparency is our goal."
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