Charles Apple

Like a lot of papers, we at The Pilot spent its resources Thursday digging up info on our local bridges. As I mentioned yesterday, we have a lot of bridges in this area. A lot. Transportation is one of our big-ticket beats.

Ace reporter Marc Davis put in several years as our bureau chief in Virginia Beach. He recently got back into reporting because he missed it. Marc spent his Thursday morning pulling together the area bridge inspection reports for South Hampton Roads.

As you probably know by now, bridges are rated on a scale of 1 to 100, with 1 being the worst. A rating below 70 means a bridge is structurally deficient. A rating below 50 means a bridge may need to be replaced.

Marc found eleven bridges in South Hampton Roads rated under 50. He found three rated under 5.

Marc and state editor Bill Bartel assembled a list of seventeen bridges in the area worthy of note and passed that list along to photo editor Norm Shaffer shortly before lunch. Norm had cut deal with our partners at TV channel 13 for photographer Bill Tiernan to shoot fresh material from the air of the bridges on our list.

Rating a whole 2 — on a scale of 1-to-100, with 1
being the worst — is the 22nd Street bridge over
Seaboard Avenue in South Norfolk. Which,
interestingly enough, isn’t in Norfolk — it’s in
Chesapeake. Last-minute photo by the Pilot’s
Hyunsoo Leo Kim.

One of the aerials shot Thursday by Pilot
photographer Bill Tiernan. This is the
Gilmerton Bridge, south of downtown.
It rated a whole 3.

This photo of the Bonner Bridge in North
Carolina’s Outer Banks was the one file
shot we used. It, too, rated only a 2.
—

While Tiernan was in the air, I built a rough proposed graphic using dummy text. My intent was to keep it as simple as possible. Lots of numbers and lots of moving pieces can make a grid approach unreadable. Simplicity is the key to a good grid.

Bill and I kept close tabs on what each other was doing: I didn’t want a nasty surprise regarding copy length and he wanted to make sure we had room for what his folks were pulling together.

We also planned to build a science piece on the type of bridge that collapsed. My ace graphics reporter, Miranda Mulligan, dove into that assignment, producing a three-column diagram describing a deck-truss bridge. There are only 12 in the state of Virginia, I’m told.

Around 3 p.m., we got our first bad news of the day: Our photographer couldn’t get all the shots we had hoped for. Some of the bridges on the list, it turned out, are tiny — they skim over small streams or ditches, really — and can’t be seen clearly from the air.

So we went to plan B: I asked artist Bob Voros to draw maps of the bridges we couldn’t shoot. He aimed for the same precise size I was using for the photos in my graphic.

As the afternoon wore on, we lost two bridges but added one: Two of the bridges on our list, Marc discovered, had been replaced since their last inspection. Naturally, we dropped them from the graphic.

Meanwhile, we finally added the one North Carolina bridge we had expected: The Bonner Bridge, which carried N.C. 12 over the Oregon Inlet in the Outer Banks. The bridge is bad shape; we’ve written about it for years. In fact, it rated out as a 2. We suddenly had a two-way tie for the worst bridge in our coverage area.

At 4 p.m., we took a break from our work to honor Allisence Chang, who was working her penultimate day as our graphics intern. She’s done great work this summer. I don’t know how we’ll get along without her. Those Michigan State kids do great work.

That’s Allisence in front, obviously. From left to
right, the rest of us are: Me, John Earle, Ken
Wright, Bob Voros and Miranda Mulligan.
—

Around 5 p.m., Bartel had finished editing Marc’s text. He passed it along to me as an Excel document.

We’ve found that even for text graphics, Excel helps us keep our columns organized and it makes it easy for artists to cut-and-paste into a grid environment. Bill and Mark’s hard work — which, thankfully, fit precisely into the holes I had designed — flowed easily onto the page.

Miranda and Allisence headed home around 6 p.m. John Earle and Ken Wright handled all our other daily assignments — all nine of them. Bob and I made a quick run to Wendy’s for dinner at 7 p.m.

By 9 p.m., I had all the text in place and the photos processed. Bob was still churning on the maps. I wanted to give Laurie Vergott of our copy desk some extra time to strain out any weirdness, so I printed out what we had so far. She began poring over the graphic.

Also around this time, we learned the desk wanted to hold Miranda’s deck-truss piece. Oh, well, we tried. Sorry, Miranda.

Laurie brought back minimal fixes. Deb Withey, the Pilot’s DME/Visuals, dropped by with a few suggestions.

Bob finished with his maps at 11 p.m. We dropped them into the holes, printed off one more to throw in front of Laurie again, and then shipped off the graphic to the maestro of our inside A section, Lauren Antonelli. Hopefully, we didn’t make her too late last night.

The result: Three-quarters of a page that looks at 16 of the area’s lowest-rated bridges.

One bridge — the Lesner Bridge over Lynnhaven Inlet in Virginia Beach — made the list twice: The westbound span rated 43.6 and the eastbound lane came in at 48.1.

On the left, the raw graphic. On the right: The finished inside page, designed by Lauren.

Click the thumbnail for a larger views:

While we toiled away in the graphics department, Nick Mrozowski — another product of Michigan State — was out on the desk, designing A1:

Nick, by the way, also designed Thursday’s front.

My only regret? Just the timing. I didn’t get home until well after midnight. But Thursday was my wife’s 44th birthday.

With any luck, I’ll get home early today, Friday. It’s our 22nd anniversary.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 3rd, 2007 at 1:24 am and is filed under Charles Apple, Graphics, News design, Newspapers, Virginian-Pilot, VizEds Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.