BOSTON — As Massachusetts drivers take on their daily commutes, all eyes are on the road. But one MassDOT unit isn’t looking at the roads at all, but their work is crucial to keeping drivers safe.
The MassDOT Underwater Operations Unit consists of seven full-time divers and others who are part-time. They’re tasked with inspecting nearly 1,300 bridges in Massachusetts that are in water three feet or deeper. Each bridge generally receives an underwater inspection every three years.
Boston 25 News traffic anchor Catherine Parrotta had the chance to watch the divers conduct their inspection of the Neponset Ave Bridge in Boston.
“Usually the reaction we get from people is, I guess somebody would have to do that, wouldn’t they?” said Bill Colleran, an engineer and diver with MassDOT. He explained, “We take people from all over MassDOT within different job groups...We train them how to be scuba divers, and then we send them to bridge inspection school to learn how to be bridge inspectors”.
Colleran went over the plan for this inspection.
“One of my biggest concerns is scour, where the soil underneath the piers or abutment is eroding away....Then we’re looking for any kind of cracks, like with this bridge, we’ll check the pointing between the granite blocks, make sure the pointing is tight. We will look for any cracked blocks, any moving blocks.”
Colleran also described some of his gear, including a dive knife.
“We use those for cutting. We get tangled a lot. There are a lot of people who fish off bridges, they’ll cut their fishing line, or there will be netting or any other number of debris.”
The divers waited for slack tide and then began their inspection. It took place under challenging conditions, including poor visibility and dreary weather. Despite these challenges, the divers were able to complete their task using specialized training and equipment.
Eric Hogan, the Eastern Area Coordinator for MassDOT’s Underwater Operations, emphasized the rigorous training divers undergo.
“You’re going to be doing a lot of feeling with your hands. We do a lot of training to simulate. We use blacked-out masks and things like that when we’re training.”
That training prepares the divers to work in conditions ranging from snow and ice to polluted water. They can also be called in for an emergency.
“For a bridge hit, we would go out and check out the condition of that. Another big one that we do is if there’s a big flood event, we’ll go out and do flood inspections to make sure that the conditions haven’t changed.”
The divers emerged from this inspection after about an hour. They found the Neponset River bridge to be in fair condition. It will be inspected again in three years, while the divers looked at a different inspection the very next day.
A day at the office, the divers say, is never boring.
If you would like to check on the health of bridges close to you in Massachusetts, you can use this interactive MassDOT Portal.
See the underwater bridge inspection report for the Neponset Ave bridge from 2022 below:
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