January 15, 2017 – Today was the 50th anniversary of the deadliest highway bridge disaster in U.S. history – the collapse of the “Silver Bridge” between Point Pleasant, West Virginia and Gallipolis, Ohio, which killed 46 people. Ten years ago, in the wake of another fatal bridge collapse, Congress seemed on the verge of expanding the existing highway bridge program, but over the next five years, attitudes towards how to best deal with the problems of bridge safety and capacity turned completely around and led to the MAP-21 law abolishing the bridge program entirely in favor of a more holistic performance-based highway-and-bridge asset management program.