Gresham Smith is proud to announce that Donald McCrary, Bridge Department Leader, will be a featured speaker at the 2026 AASHTO Committee on Bridges & Structures meeting, taking place Tuesday, June 30, in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Donald will join Rebecca Hayworth, Bridge Performance Manager with Tennessee Department of Transportation’s (TDOT) Structures Division, during the Safety & Evaluation Technical Committee Meeting to present on the innovative TDOT Culvert Load Rating Project.
State departments of transportation increasingly face the challenge of conducting load ratings for extensive culvert inventories using traditional, structure-by-structure methods. This presentation will showcase an automated framework developed by Gresham Smith to efficiently support load rating for approximately 9,000 reinforced concrete culverts across Tennessee.
The solution integrates a centralized Load Rating Management platform with an automated modeling engine that programmatically generates AASHTOWare BrR models—leveraging digitized standard culvert plans and inspection data. This streamlined workflow facilitates data retrieval, standard plan matching, and model generation, all while preserving essential engineering reviews of geometry, reinforcement, and modeling assumptions.
By applying consistent, agency-approved assumptions, the framework produces reliable automated models and rating results, significantly enhancing efficiency, consistency and scalability for statewide culvert load rating programs.
