In late October, a state Department of Transportation worker was driving across the Skagit River Bridge in Washington when he noticed a tear in the metal of the first overhead portal on the bridge.
He drove past it several times and noticed it was also bent from the impact.
Nobody knows which load struck the bridge. Truckers often hit bridges throughout the state of Washington without stopping to report damage. The DOT repaired the damage a month later -- with taxpayer money.
Then on May 23, a span of the Skagit River Bridge collapsed into the water after a strike by an overheight load, sending two vehicles and three people into the river. No one was seriously injured.
A permanent fix to the bridge will be constructed later this year.
So far officials have said that a tractor-trailer hauling an overheight load from Alberta, Canada, struck the bridge, causing its collapse.
The driver of that overheight load told investigators he felt crowded by another tractor-trailer and was forced to move to the right. In some ways, this crash was different than dozens before -- the driver stopped immediately after the incident.
But that is not always the case.
Most big-rig drivers continue as if nothing happened, and the taxpayer is left footing the bill for repairs.
In the past 10 years, potentially dozens of overheight loads have struck the bridge. But an analysis of a State Patrol database of collisions on the Skagit River Bridge shows nobody was ever cited for those strikes. Unreported bridge strikes are a statewide problem, and repair costs are rolled into existing bridge maintenance costs.
Without a witness to such strikes, which have been recorded dozens of times in bridge reports since 1996, it's almost impossible for the State Patrol to hold someone accountable, said State Trooper Keith Leary.
"If they do hit one and they drive away, for all intents and purposes we aren't going to find the truck if they don't report it," he said.
Witnesses to any crash can play a pivotal role, Leary said. In one instance about two years ago, a truck had struck three or four spans of the Snohomish River Bridge on Highway 529 north of Everett -- and kept driving. A witness reported the impact and soon, State Patrol officers were trailing the driver.
"He continued to Marysville before he was stopped," Leary said.
Leary encouraged drivers who notice a high-load strike on a bridge to get as much information about the load as possible.
He said most people have phones that can take high quality photos and videos, and such evidence can be key.
"That helps us miles," Leary said. "It saves us a lot of time and makes sure we are holding other people accountable. If somebody's doing something wrong on the road, just because a police officer isn't there doesn't mean that it's not being watched or it's not being captured."
Anyone who leaves the scene would be committing hit and run, Leary said. That's a misdemeanor that is punishable with up to 24 hours in jail or a fine of no less than $250 on a first offense.
Commercial vehicle drivers also could be cited for violating an oversized vehicle permit. Those violations have a variety of fines, depending on severity, Leary said.
Harvey Coffman, a bridge preservation engineer with DOT, said the agency has been more proactive about making companies pay for damage caused by their drivers.
"That only works if we know who did the damage," Coffman said. "There've been cases where we haven't been able to find out. Those become projects in the bridge program."
Repairs are paid out of a DOT third-party maintenance fund, he said. Figures for expenditures from that fund were not available.
Many times, the DOT won't know about bridge damage until inspectors visit the bridge for annual or semi-annual inspections, Coffman said. Some strikes are of little concern -- cosmetic scuffs or tiny scratches.
Coffman said roughly 1,500 oversize and overheight loads cross the Skagit River Bridge every month.
Since the bridge was built in 1955, only a few strikes that concerned bridge engineers have been recorded.
Many high-load hits statewide come from equipment haulers, such as cranes and excavators, said DeWayne Wilson, DOT bridge management engineer.
Bridge collisions occur "when people have not taken the time to figure out how high every point of their equipment is and knowing what the vertical clearance is," Wilson said.
Overweight loads could exacerbate the problem, because bridge strikes are harder to detect, Coffman said.
"Some of these loads are extremely heavy," he said.
Drivers of heavy, slower-moving loads may not even notice a bridge strike, Coffman said.
"It depends on the load and how hard it hits the bridge, obviously," he said. "I've seen examples where our maintenance guys have followed truckers down the road as they were hitting bridges and they had no clue they were hitting them."
One solution is to require overheight sensors near exit points on roadways, Coffman said. Such sensors would detect loads that would not meet height requirements of upcoming bridges and would notify truckers of the upcoming danger. Coffman said he's reaching out to trucking companies to encourage them to invest in the technology.
Currently state law says truckers are responsible for knowing their route, the heights of the bridges and whether their load would fit underneath them.
A month after last year's high-load bridge strike, the DOT inspected the bridge and repaired the tear.
Upon closer inspection, workers noted high-load damage on eight overhead bridge trusses. Damage included small dents, bends, nicks, deformations, gouges and tears, according to a November 2012 bridge inspection report.
The latest report, from the May 23 bridge strike, shows the load may have struck areas higher than it had a permit for.
The tractor-trailer had a permit for a load as high as 15-foot-9 inches. Sections of the Skagit River Bridge range from 18' tall in the center to 14'-6" against the righthand barrier.
But areas of the bridge that were struck were higher than the permit allowed, according to the inspection report that DOT officials completed shortly after the collapse.
The load also struck the bridge in areas that were 15'-11" inches, 16'-1" and 16'-4", according to a DOT bridge inspection report.
On May 26, National Transportation Safety Board Chairman Debbie Hersman said there was evidence that the load bounced and rocked on its wheel base after it initially struck the bridge.
The National Transportation Safety Board has not released an official height for the load that struck the bridge. More information could come in a year.
