Last week marked the 30th anniversary of the Mianus River Bridge collapse in Connecticut that killed three people and injured three more. The anniversary comes on the heels of a recently released Transportation for America report that shows one in nine bridges in the United States to be structurally deficient, and compares the quality of bridges across states. But how do the United States’ bridges compare to other industrialized countries’ infrastructure?

Since 2000, there have been more bridge failures in the United States than in all members of the Group of Eight (G8) nations combined. Between 2000 and today, five bridges in the G8 nations, which include Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States, have collapsed due to structural failure (and not due to fire, flooding, earthquakes, tornadoes, collisions, derailments or bridges that collapsed during construction or restoration). Four of the five bridge failures took place in the United States. TSTC identified these by surveying lists of bridge collapses from Better Roads as well as Wikipedia’s expansive list of bridge failures, and then further investigating each collapse that met the aforementioned criteria:

• Skagit River Bridge (Mount Vernon, Washington) — While the May 2013 collapse of the Skagit River Bridge was blamed on a truck that clipped an overhead support, more information has since come to light that indicates the bridge was never flagged for safety concerns by the Washington State Department of Transportation, despite the fact that it had been taking hits from trucks for years.

• Hoan Bridge (Milwaukee, Wisconsin) — The Hoan Bridge, which spans the Milwaukee River, buckled suddenly in December 2000 when “two of the three major girders holding up one section of the bridge had snapped.”

• I-35W bridge over the Mississippi River (Minneapolis, Minnesota) — The August 2007 collapse, which killed 13 people, was blamed on the use of gusset plates that were too small. The bridge was also retrofitted with a thicker concrete deck and a median barrier, and it was supporting 300 tons of construction equipment during the time of collapse.

• Harp Road Bridge (Oakville, Washington) — The collapse of this bridge, which happened two weeks to the day after the I-35 bridge collapse in Minneapolis, was blamed on heavy loads well above what the bridge was designed to accommodate.

The other bridge failure took place in Laval, Quebec, Canada. The De la Concorde Overpass failed due to a “disastrous cocktail of factors” including improperly installed rebar and the use of low-quality concrete.

The Transportation for America report makes clear that the United States has a long way to go to ensure bridge infrastructure is in a state of good repair. But the states who maintain these bridges face increasing difficulty in finding funding for these fixes. The federal transportation law, MAP-21, eliminated a Highway Bridge Program that earmarked funds for these specific purposes. Instead, obtaining funding to repair bridges now competes with other transportation projects, and the prospect of addressing the significant safety concerns of failing bridges remains daunting.

TSTC’s Ben Rosenblatt also contributed to this post.