Dave Fehling on his story

It’s destruction going on right underneath you as you drive across bridges in Houston, and all the rain is making matters worse.

Already, some bridges are in trouble as week-after-week, high, fast-moving water in bayous and rivers erodes the soil around critical supports.

Air 11 was over the Trinity River just east of Houston when it spotted a repair crew headed for trouble-on-the-tracks. A big concrete pier holding up a bridge had washed out.

Weeks of heavy rain has rivers and bayous running high and fast, and that can mean trouble.

Like on Highway 288. Part of the abutment has collapsed, threatening the stability of a bridge crossed by thousands of drivers a day.

With storm clouds above them, crews drove steel pilings into the rain-soaked soil to shore it up.

TxDOT said th bridge across Sims Bayou at Highway 288 was known to be in good condition until all if the rains came. It raises a serious concern: There are dozens of bridges around Houston that are known to be in critical condition and have been that way for years.

On the state list of bridges deemed unstable but still useable:

•I-45 over Buffalo Bayou downtown

•The Eastex over the San Jacinto River

•The North Freeway bridge over the San Jacinto River

In all, some 55 bridges in and around Houston.

Is all the rain making any of them more unstable?

“If we need to shut a roadway down, we’ll do it,” said TxDOT’s head bridge designer Kenneth Ozuna.

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Ozuna said while they may step up inspections, TxDOT’s not fearful of any catastrophic collapses.

“They don’t go down quickly and without a fight,” he said. “Typically what happens is there’ll be a dip in the roadway, and we get phone calls.”

At Texas A&M University, Jean-Louis Briaud with the Texas Transportation Institute has photos of cars dangling from bridges, bridges buckled by floodwaters and washed away by Hurricane Katrina.

Briaud was hired by TxDOT to figure out which of the unstable bridges in Houston and around the state are in the most critical need of repair.

“The higher the flood, the more erosion that will take place, and we’re getting some pretty big floods, obviously,” Briaud said.

He said he’s confident that TxDOT is monitoring the unstable bridges and floods or not, problems will be caught before it’s too late.

“The process is quite slow actually,” Briaud said. “This is a process that will take place over many, many years.”

That process is what you see in after a flood: The water has dug-out the soil from around the pier that holds the bridge up.

11 News: “And you can only dig so far before that support topples over?”

Briaud: “That’s correct.”

It’s what’s potentially happening right now in Houston: swollen rivers and bayous doing damage faster to the foundations of bridges, meaning some may have to be repaired sooner than later.