BATON ROUGE, LA – Just hours after more small earthquakes rattled north Louisiana Monday morning, the Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development announced that plans for a new Mississippi River bridge will be delayed another ten years while engineers conduct several studies on how earthquakes might affect bridges.
Officials said the tremors revealed a “previously unconsidered geological factor,” commonly referred to as the ground.
DOTD confirmed the agency will commission a dozen studies totaling $19 million to examine whether bridges function properly when the earth beneath them occasionally moves.
“We simply cannot move forward until we fully understand how bridges are built on ground prone to an earthquake every couple hundred years,” a DOTD spokesperson said.
The project has already been studied for more than two decades, but officials say the new earthquake activity makes additional research essential.
“If we rushed construction without fully studying the situation,” one engineer explained, “we might accidentally end up building the bridge and that wouldn’t be good for anyone.”
DOTD officials said the next step will be forming a committee to appoint a panel of earthquake specialists who will help the department begin identifying someone willing to travel to Louisiana and assist in assembling a working group tasked with determining the most appropriate place to begin studying where the new studies should start.
