You have to give it to this city sometimes. Whenever there’s a freak natural disaster (or several), you can at least count on them to be vigorously retroactive in their efforts to haphazardly band-aid any infrastructural hemorrhaging. Be it debris cleanup due to freak flood, errant windstorm or biblical snowfall, you can rest assured that our ever-shrinking pool of Metro personnel will do their best within extremely limited means.

It’s a combination that makes something like a decaying, potentially hazardous bridge more of a cause for alarm than it should be in 21st Century ‘Merica: without the necessary personnel to promptly clean up a disaster after the fact, how can we hope to catch a cantilevered truss before it falls into the Ohio?

MADISON, Ind. — Inspectors have found that the condition of an 80-year-old bridge spanning the Ohio River between Indiana and Kentucky is as bad or worse than it was before being refurbished in 1997.

The inspection of the Madison-Milton bridge found its beams and trusses in poor condition. The report on the January inspection for Kentucky’s transportation agency says that the bridge deck had cracks all the way across and through the concrete curbs at five-foot and 10-foot intervals.

The C-J article goes on to say that the results of an August inspection will, according to “officials,” take another two months to complete. A joint venture between the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet and the Indiana Department of Transportation is attempting to secure stimulus funding for a new bridge in the area, but that’s currently in its planning stage and likely won’t materialize for at least another year or two. In the meantime, the KYTC advises those motorists using the bridge to wear flotation devices at all times, and to carry a dry wall hammer to knock out your automobile’s windows in the event of submersion.

This is no joke, however: One in every three bridges in the state is either structurally deficient, functionally obsolete or completely fucking gnarled like the one in “Evil Dead.”Also, one in every five roads is in either “poor or mediocre condition,” and more people than ever are driving on those roads at a time when there are less city and state workers to care for them.

And you should keep in mind that our bridges like to spontaneously combust whenever they feel like it, which is an unpleasant thought considering the tragedies that have already occurred in other aging, economically wrought metropolitan areas, but nonetheless highlights our region’s own deficiences in light of them. Given the fiscal realities of the Commonwealth, however, plus the slow-to-start appropriations of simtulus-funded road work to that great bureaucratic vampire, the KYTC, and the current public focus on the Quixotic Ohio River Bridges Project, the Madison-Milton is one of many to cross our fingers for.