Mistakes or Lessons?

Hi, I’m John Lange. For 27 years, I was an electrician for the North Carolina Department of Transportation. I was responsible for maintaining three of the state’s most critical drawbridges. Now I am contracting electrical work for private and non-governmental drawbridges…at least I was when I wrote this. Who knows what future-me is up to now?

Sometime during my first year as a bridge electrician, I responded to a bascule bridge that had failed to seat properly. With traffic at a standstill and adrenaline running high, I arrived on the scene and tried everything I could think of to bring the span down, but nothing worked. The bridge was stuck about three feet in the air. It might as well have been fully raised, given how little progress I was making.

Releasing all the brakes had no effect at all. The span stubbornly remained those same three feet up. Eventually, out of options, I looked for my last hope: the auxiliary drive, a backup system I had only heard about. What I found nearly sent me into panic. There was no way to connect the auxiliary drive to the main shaft.

The system had been designed with a sprocket on the auxiliary motor and another on the main drive shaft. In theory, a heavy-duty chain (something like a bicycle chain on steroids) should have connected the two. But there was no sign of a chain anywhere.

In the end, I had to improvise. I drove my truck over the large gap in the roadway with just enough speed to cross the balance point over the bearing so I wouldn’t be forcing the bridge higher…and importantly stopping before I jumped off the span!  My goal was to land far enough out onto the span to force it back down. It probably looked pretty impressive, but I was far too nervous at the time to appreciate the stunt.

Once traffic was moving again, I took a closer look at the auxiliary drive. I never did find the missing chain, but I did discover the motor wasn’t functioning. It had a faulty power feed conductor.

That experience made a lasting impression. I decided to inspect every one of my bridges, and to my surprise, none of the auxiliary drives were operational. Not one. I made it a top priority to change that. Once I had them all working, I spent time learning how to use them. Then I kept practicing until I was completely confident in their operation.

From that point on, and for the rest of my career, I made sure the auxiliary drives stayed functional and that I stayed fluent in using them. To me, knowing how to operate one was just as essential as knowing how to change a tire on a car.

Not long ago, less than two months after I retired, I heard about a failure at one of my former bridges. Traffic was held up for almost an hour and a half. When I asked the on-call electrician why they didn’t use the auxiliary drive, he told me the maintenance responder had tried but couldn’t get it to work. I knew for a fact that the drive had been fully operational when I left. The problem wasn’t with the equipment. It was with the lack of knowledge on how to use it.

I understand how easy it is to criticize from the outside, but there’s no excuse for the department responsible for bridge maintenance to be unfamiliar with a system that exists specifically to solve this kind of problem.

What worries me most is that even after such a poor response, no effort will be made to correct the gap in training. I firmly believe mistakes are acceptable, as long as you learn from them. In that case, a mistake becomes a learning opportunity. But if you fail to take the lesson, you’re just setting yourself up to repeat the same failure again and again.

I hope anyone involved in drawbridge maintenance takes the time to learn how the auxiliary drives on their bridges work, and then practices until they’re confident in using them. I would recommend that maintenance departments schedule quarterly training sessions. That way, personnel can reinforce what they’ve learned and be better prepared when the real moment comes. Preparation like that can spare the public hours of unnecessary inconvenience and help avoid situations that could have been resolved in minutes instead of hours.