City and state inspection records indicate it was only a matter of time before something went wrong with the DuSable Lake Shore Drive bridge over the Chicago River.
Traffic on DLSD became severely jammed near Grand Avenue on Wednesday when extreme heat prompted the bridge that carries the major expressway over the Chicago River to become stuck during a scheduled lift, city officials said.
A “heat-related issue” prevented the bridge from fully closing for several hours and prompted firefighters and officials with the city’s Office of Emergency Management to spend several hours hosing the bridge down with cold water to cool the steel so it could close again.
“Basically, the level of expansion resulting from the extreme heat we are experiencing nowadays here in Illinois caused some excessive expansion of one part over the other,” said Bassem Andrawes, professor of Civil Engineering at the University of Illinois. “And that led to the fact that when they tried to close these two halves again, that was unsuccessful.”
While the heat also caused a similar jam on a bridge over the Calumet River just hours later, an inspection report from Sept. 2024 states that the DLSD bridge was found to be “structurally deficient” and “functionally obsolete” — something DePaul University transportation expert Joseph Schwieterman says likely had a role in the malfunction.
“There was a lot about this bridge that’s needing repair,” Schwieterman said. “It’s an old structure, probably had tolerances in terms of the gap with the pavement and the bridge that were out of line. So, you throw in hot temperatures that were just more than the bridge could handle.”
Under the category of structural evaluation, the bridge was also deemed “intolerable” and given a “high priority for correction” in the 2024 report.
Despite the poor evaluation, the report goes on to state “the fact that a bridge is ‘deficient’ does not immediately imply that it is likely to collapse or that it is unsafe.”
According to a city press release, CDOT crews worked on the bridge between February and May 2024, but the inspection report that found the deteriorating conditions was done in September of that year – several months later.
Now, the DLSD bridge is due for another inspection.
CDOT Commissioner William Cheaks was not available on Wednesday to answer questions, including specifically why the city would schedule a bridge lift knowing the bridge’s history and the extremely high temperatures.
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