Railroad Bridge Inspector's Report Consists Entirely of the Word 'Fine' Repeated 347 Times

A routine audit of railroad bridge inspection records has revealed that a contract bridge inspector submitted reports for 347 bridges across two states consisting entirely of the word 'Fine' entered once per bridge in the condition assessment field, with no supporting photographs, measurements, or structural observations of any kind. The inspector, who has been terminated, submitted the reports over a three-month period during which he was contracted to evaluate bridges on a short-line railroad in the Upper Midwest. Each report follows an identical format: Bridge ID number, followed by 'Condition: Fine,' followed by 'Recommended Action: None.' 'Fine is not a structural engineering term,' said audit supervisor Dr. Patricia Abutment. 'We have a rating scale from 1 to 9. We have categories for deck, superstructure, substructure, and waterway. We have a 27-page inspection form. He wrote Fine. For 347 bridges. Including three that have been closed for repairs.' The inspector, reached for comment, defended his methodology. 'I drove past them,' he said. 'They looked fine. I'm a visual inspector. I visually inspected them. From the road. Some of them from the highway. If a bridge looks fine from the highway, it probably is fine.' 'You cannot inspect a bridge from the highway,' Dr. Abutment responded. 'The highway is sometimes a mile from the bridge. Some of these bridges are over rivers. He would have needed binoculars to see them, and even then, he couldn't assess the structural members.' The railroad has commissioned emergency re-inspections of all 347 bridges. Preliminary results indicate that 344 are in satisfactory condition, two require minor maintenance, and one — a 1920s-era timber trestle — is in a condition the re-inspector described as 'emphatically not fine.' 'He got lucky,' Dr. Abutment said. 'Three hundred and forty-four out of 347 bridges are actually fine. But he didn't know that. He didn't check. He wrote Fine because it's the shortest word that means nothing is wrong, and he submitted it 347 times because that's how many bridges he was supposed to inspect. The laziness is almost elegant in its simplicity.'