Inside the story of the Crown Point Bridge

The thousands of people who used to travel the Crown Point bridge spanning Lake Champlain between New York and Vermont have been fired up since New York's Department of Transportation announced it was in such bad shape, the only viable option was to tear it down and replace it.

Jerry Gretzinger heard the tough questions being asked and took them all to the DOT commissioner and met the man credited with helping to avoid a tragedy.

***

Some people might say it's his fault, but Tom Hoffman and his employer, the New York state Department of Transportation, say it was really their good fortune.

"You're not going to get any claps on the back for causing all this pain for people," Hoffman says. 

He was working on the Crown Point bridge, just doing routine steel inspections, when he glanced down near the water level and saw something that wasn't quite right.

Underwater inspections weren't supposed to happen for another year and a half but because of Tom's discovery, they were moved up.

And it was a good thing.

The NYS DOT noticed a more deterioration on under water piers than ever before.

Stanley Gee, acting DOT commissioner, says they had no way of knowing how fast the bridge was deteriorating.

Underwater inspections usually take place once every 5 years and every time, they'd noticed just 1 inch of erosion on the piers. This time, in just 3 and a half years, there was more than 14 inches of erosion.

Jerry asked Gee, "Do you think that's enough? Should we we be inspecting underwater elements of bridges more often than once every 5 years?"

Gee responded, "Once every 5 years is the protocol. But if we notice things are happening, a trend, or notice anything that happens over time, we accelerate that. "

He adds they are accelerating the pace for constructing a replacement bridge, but "I can't pinpoint a date."

"We will build reinforced concrete piers. The piers and foundation will be reinforced concrete. The design will be using contemporary materials and modern construction methods and hopefully we'll get another 75-100 years out of the new bridge."

Perhaps harder for people to admit, this once in a lifetime inconvience was a once in a lifetime stroke of good luck.

That such an observant worker was where he was when he was.

"You could have had a Minnesota type bridge collapse," says Hoffman.

Six competing designs for the replacement bridge were made public this weekend. A date for the implosion of the current span has not been set.