CINCINNATI — We still don’t know what caused a playground fire hot enough to melt metal on the Big Mac bridge last month, but we have learned that Hamilton County had more than a dozen bridge fires in recent years and bridge netting might have made this one worse.
A state bridge inspector flagged a problem with low-hanging nets on the bridge in July. Those nets, installed to keep concrete from falling on the 1,000 Hands Playground, were scheduled to be cleaned out in November. Instead, they caught fire, making it easier for flames to scorch the bridge’s steel supports.
“The more combustible material you introduce, the more problems you're going to have,” said Casey Jones, a Kansas City-based engineering consultant who has followed the fire and its aftermath on his YouTube channel. “I don't know that it contributed significantly to the intensity of that fire because that, that fire was like a blowtorch. (But) it just makes it easier for that material to catch on fire.”
RELATED | ODOT: Southbound side of Big Mac Bridge currently slated to re-open in March
The July inspection of the Big Mac, or Daniel Carter Beard Bridge, was among several Ohio Department of Transportation documents obtained by the WCPO 9 I-Team in a public records request.
The I-Team requested documents showing how ODOT responded to a 2023 memo by the Federal Highway Administration. It urged bridge inspectors in all 50 states to watch out for flammable materials stored beneath bridges.
ODOT Bridge Inspector Eric Schmidt did not describe the netting or the playground as a fire hazard, but Cincinnati fire officials said the nets caught fire when flames filled the space between the playground and the bridge.
“Netting place(d) over playground in spans 3 and 4,” Schmidt wrote in the July 27 inspection report. “Debris collecting in netting, causing netting to droop, area at right or east edge, needs debris removed. Netting debris removed in 2022.”
ODOT spokesman Matt Bruning said the problem was close to being solved when the playground caught fire.
“I’m told they need a specialized piece of equipment to reach that section of bridge,” Bruning said. “Ironically, that concrete debris removal was scheduled for November.”
The I-Team is trying to learn as much as it can about the Big Mac fire because the 48-year-old bridge carries more than 100,000 vehicles per day. Although repairs are underway, the ongoing closure of its southbound lanes continues to snarl traffic and impede commerce in the I-471 corridor.
But it turns out bridge fires aren’t all that unusual in Hamilton County.
“The homeless encampments are a continual concern,” ODOT District 8 Engineer Brandon Collett wrote in a December 2023 email to his boss, Sean Meddles, administrator of ODOT’s office of structural engineering. “We seem to have a fire or two a year in Hamilton County, with several fires hot enough to crack cross-frame welds, melt joint elastomer seals, and they all tend to do at least $100k of paint destruction.”
Collett expressed frustration about the ongoing problem.
“We chase them from bridge to bridge (about 50 different locations), and the police have become less responsive to our requests to ‘evict’ people living under our bridges over the last couple years,” he wrote.
Collett was also part of an email chain that lasted for months about two trailers that were abandoned beneath the Brent Spence Bridge. Collett raised the issue within ODOT in November 2023 because “some homeless have taken up residence in at least one” of the trailers and he was concerned about fire risk.
In February, after several months of back-and-forth emails, Cincinnati Fire Chief Matthew Flagler notified ODOT’s Brent Spence Bridge Corridor Project Manager that the trailers were removed.
In August, Collett emailed city officials about an abandoned railroad bridge that crosses I-71 near Elsinore Avenue.
“There is an active homeless encampment that hinders inspection and inspector safety,” Collett wrote to Matt Halcomb, a senior city engineer. “As you may recall, there was a fire on this bridge over traffic last November. Please have the ends of the bridge better secured, signed for no trespassing and/or patrolled to prevent future encampments.”
Halcomb responded by contacting the city manager’s office “to start the process of removing the camps.”
That fire, in the overnight hours of Nov. 27, 2023, required firefighters to extinguish flames on the Elsinore Bridge.
"We performed a safety inspection this morning," city engineer Reiner Reising wrote in a Nov. 28, 2023 email to Collett about the fire. "It appears that campers/vandals had a small propane tank (and a lot of plastic). In comparison to fires below a bridge the staining and damage was less widespread. It appears that the one area where a significant amount of heat was released was where the propane tank was leaning against one of the sway braces."
The fire did not cause any long-term structural damage, according to an ODOT inspection days later.
But crews returned to the bridge just last week, on the day before Thanksgiving, removing so much debris that it filled a large dumpster.
Meanwhile, fire investigators have been tight-lipped on the cause of the Big Mac blaze.
But Jones said the concerns raised by ODOT are worth exploring.
Transportation officials "need to think about collectively what is going on underneath our bridges," Jones said. "You don't want anything that's going to impede access for inspections or maintenance and repair or can cause a problem like this."
