An under-bridge inspection truck is how a bridge inspector gets beneath the deck. The truck parks on the roadway, and an articulated boom reaches out over the railing, down, and back under the structure, carrying people in a platform or bucket at its end. The whole arrangement depends on the truck's stability and the integrity of its boom, which is why these machines are expected to carry certificates showing they have been examined and meet federal requirements.
On or about August 26, 2015, a truck leased from a Virginia rental company to a Connecticut engineering firm was being used for a bridge inspection on Interstate 84 in West Hartford when it overturned. Its operator was killed.
A joint investigation by the Inspectors General of the Departments of Transportation and Labor led to a federal indictment in Hartford. According to the Inspector General's summary of the charges:
The charges included making false documents, falsifying records in a federal investigation, and wire fraud. A separate federal release reports that the surveyor who issued the certificates admitted to falsely certifying bridge inspection vehicles, and in 2022 the rental company paid $137,500 to resolve civil False Claims Act allegations concerning the certificates.
Most inspection failures in this series involve work that was done poorly or left unfinished. This one is simpler: as alleged, the inspection was a document and nothing else. The engineering firm that leased the truck, the operator who rode its boom, and the highway agency that owned the bridge all had the same thing to rely on — a one-page certificate from a third party. A real certificate and a purchased one are indistinguishable on paper, because the paper never contained any trace of the examination itself.
There is an uncomfortable symmetry in it. The trucks exist so that bridges can be inspected for real, by a person looking at steel. The trucks themselves were cleared by a signature.
SureSight's premise is that an inspection record should be made of what the inspector saw. That makes a certificate something that can be checked, by anyone downstream, in minutes.
No examination, no record. A SureSight inspection is generated by doing the inspection: the examiner wears the glasses and works through the boom, pins, hydraulics, outriggers, and controls, and computer vision confirms each observable step against the required checklist. The record is timestamped first-person imagery of that specific vehicle. There is nothing to sign if nobody looked.
A certificate the renter can open. The firm leasing the truck — and the operator about to ride the boom — can see the evidence behind the certificate, not just its conclusion: which unit, which date, which items were verified, and which were not. A certificate with no examination behind it is immediately recognizable as exactly that.
Volume fraud stops being cheap. Producing a false form takes minutes and looks identical to a true one. Fabricating a verified, step-by-step visual record of a particular machine, over and over across a fleet and several years, is a different undertaking entirely — and one that fleet owners, insurers, and regulators can audit by sampling the imagery.
Clear answers after an incident. When something does go wrong, an objective record of the machine's last examination and pre-use checks serves the investigation and the honest operator alike, and it leaves far less room for the facts to be rewritten afterward.