Daily News from New York, New York • 194

I 0 Daily News, Tuesday, November 16, 1982 By KATHY LARKIN George Zaimes and Henry Sloan the city's bridges; They're worried. "jw 1 11 1111 consultants. His first move: scrapping new highway-building plans in favor of rehabilitation and zeroing in on the city's bridges. "It was hard," he said dryly, "to determine which bridge was in worse shape when we got here. The profession-' als, not the politicians, but the technical people who knew what was happening had pretty well bitten their nails down to the second knuckle.

With reason." Zaimes said: "Of the four East River bridges, the youngest is 73 years old, the oldest 100. All were designed for lighter, different traffic loads than the ones they carry today. But no complete stress analysis had ever been performed on these bridges." Joining forces with the city and Sloan, incorporating their programs and his in 1978, Zaimes over the next two years completed the inspections of the city's 2,001 bridges. The results were not encouraging. Said Zaimes: "One relief is that we are no longer, playing Russian roulette.

We now know where the bullet will come from and which eyeball it will pierce." By last year, 350 problem bridges (including viaducts) had been identified; decisions made on float time (how long a bridge can stand) and whether an emergency operation or a shoring up would buy time. Rehabilitation of the four main East River bridges will be staggered over 15 to .20 years. Said Zaimes: "We're not rushing to complete any one bridge because there is no money to do that." (His first-year, budget of $250 million has been cut below half that.) The Manhattan Bridge, which carries 120,000 cars daily and thousands of subway riders, was designed by Leon Moisseiff, the same man who did the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. Said Zaimes: "We all know what happened to that one a classic problem engineers call Galloping Gertie. It was twisting and turning; finally it started to weave and fell down.

"The Manhattan Bridge is show- ing tortional deflections outside a normally accepted range, twisting to a degree of eight feet when subway cars cross the outside lanes of the bridge. The middle span is twisting and being held solid at the towers where the snapping and reverse stress problem is extreme. Of roughly 22,000 steel members of the "Manhattan Bridge, 25 are cracked. All that twisting against itself and at right angles to the cables eventually induces brittle fracture." An estimated $150 million will be spent on the bridge. One weekend last summer, contractors ripped out a 72-foot area at the worst trouble spot, under the Manhattan Tower, replacing it with a new panel and adding diagonal members needed to stiffen the flooring panel against twisting.

In the test area, the twisting has stopped. Zaimes is installing strain gauges to measure the effectiveness of his "fix" over a period of months. One of Zaimes' first acts on the Continued on page 3 DT'S A TIGHT little island. So commuters criss-cross bridges and highways the way most peo-: pie cross a doorstep. But how safe is the trip? The bridges of New York, those; life-carrying arteries that connect the city and the rest of the country, have been in intensive care since 1978.

That's when the first real checkup began under a newly created state-city task force. The spection, reflecting national concern with a crumbling American infrastructure, was made possible by money. This came from a federal transportation act with an 80-20 mix of federal and state fund-mate h' ing that at last permitted city engineers to start mending the bridges and highways of the five boroughs. But has the money come soon enough? And will shrinking funds slashed by state and city fiscal problems be sufficient? For two men especially, Bronx-born George Zaimes, 54, director of engineering for the state Department of Transportation and Brooklyn native Henry Sloan, 45, assistant commissioner of highway operations for the city, repairs are stilL a race against time and budget. A ceiling imposed on available federal funds by the Reagan administration over the past two years cost New York City $100,000 in the current fiscal year.

And the city's bridges and roads continue to crumble. For Zaimes and Sloan, dealing with four main bridges the Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queensboro and Williamsburg links across the East River and with miles of internal highways and overpasses and thousands of smaller viaducts, the job has been a series of narrowly missed disasters. They've had to choose priorities, defer repairs, patch structures with a Band-Aid measure of money and a lot of hope. Accidents still occur. On July 28, 1981, a small diagonal cable on the Brooklyn Bridge snapped and fatally injured Japanese visitor Akira Aimi.

Sloan, a former Marine and a 20-year city service veteran, had been attempting the impossible even before 1975 when the city, in the middle of a fiscal crisis, finally faced up to its hazardous physical state. "In 1975," Sloan said, "we had just experienced the collapse and subsequent closing of the West Side Highway." Prodded by Transportation Commissioner Anthony Amer-uso, the city began to consider plans and funds for repair. "But the money," said Sloan, "didn't start flowing until 1978." Zaimes arrived -at the newly created New York City Region 11 office in 1977 to direct and coordinate the state and city programs. The first problem he saw was inadequate staffing, which remains despite a beefed-up state staff of 200, separate city offices with 100 maintehce workers, 10 engineers on regular bridge duty (another 240 shared with other Department of Transportation projects) and hundreds of outside ss. v.

-y- lit TONY PESCATOR DAILY NEWS Sloan on the Brooklyn Bridge: Is it safe to stand there?.