San Francisco Injury Lawyer Blog
According to Medicinet (a part of WebMD), gephyrophobia is relatively common although few sufferers know the precise term. In layman’s terms, gephyrophobia is an irrational fear of bridges. While we do not intend to make light of a real psychological condition, a recent report on bridge safety in the Bay Area and nationwide has our San Francisco bridge accident lawyer wondering whether fear of bridges is always so irrational.
NBC and GAO Report on State of Bridges
Earlier this year, NBC Bay Area’s Investigative Unit (“the Unit”) looked into the state of area bridges and, as discussed in an updated article published this week, the news station’s concerns are now being echoed in a report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (“GAO”). In April, the Unit found that 472 of the nearly 4,000 bridges in the Bay Area were rated “structurally deficient” by expert engineers, meaning some part of the core 
structure needs either repair or replacement. Although NBC reports that this number has improved a bit to 405 based on the GAO’s latest numbers, a disturbing 10% of the bridges in the nine county region remain in need of important work. Another 17% of the region’s bridges are functionally obsolete. Notably, functionally obsolete means the bridge is no longer adequate for its purpose but it does not mean the bridge is out of service or that there is a specific defect. As USA Today reported, the bridge that collapsed on I-10 in Southern California back in July had been labeled functionally obsolete in a 2014 National Bridge Inventory.