Yup, that’s me in the photo. You’re probably wondering how I ended up hanging under a bridge over the Mississippi River. I’m a certified bridge safety inspector.

If you have questions after seeing people hanging under a bridge, in a basket suspended from the long arm of a truck, or have seen people crawling over the steel structure with seemingly nothing preventing them from falling off, I’ve got some answers.

After a long ride in a windowless van with 10 other people into the middle of Louisiana, a scramble over a barrier, I go down a ladder to get on a pier of the Horace Wilkinson Bridge on Interstate I-10, which carries traffic in and out of Baton Rouge. In order for it to continue to do so, the bridge will undergo a rigorous inspection. Our team will spend the next two weeks climbing and crawling over every single inch of the 54-year-old “new bridge,” as it is referred to by locals.

There’s nothing glamorous about bridge inspection—especially during July in Louisiana—but, in the interest of public safety, we carry on.

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