I wanted to highlight an incredibly cool new investigative report and interactive feature that just launched over where I work, msnbc.com, looking at bridges in America. Ordinarily, this would be a pretty mundane topic to cover, but with the collapse of I-35 in Minneapolis last August, it’s a topic with great deal of urgency.

Bill Dedman, msnbc.com’s investigative reporter, looked at federal records to determine whether bridges had been inspected in the previous 24 months. The bridges – nearly 600,000 – were then classified as “not deficient,” “functionally obsolete” or “structurally deficient.” Dedman found that at least 17,000 bridges haven’t been inspected in the past two years, as is federally required, that there’s no real penalty for not meeting the mandated time frame and that there is a great degree of difference, state to state, about how bridge inspection is handled.

Then, there’s some magic – all of that data was dropped into a database and mashed up with a Virtual Earth map to create the bridge tracker application. The bridge tracker will let you plot a route – such as the one you take to work every day – and see how long it’s been since a bridge was inspected and the status of those bridges. All of that cleaned and collated data is available for free as Excel spreadsheets to anyone who wants to use it.

Even if I didn’t work with the people who put this together, I’d think that this is unbelievably cool. More than anything, though, it’s a great example of the kind of journalism that comes from smart people with great ideas and hard work. Mind you, I’m not tooting my own horn here, I had nothing to do with this project, that credit belongs to Bill Dedman’s investigative work, Phil Zepeda, who built the map application, designer Julie Yokers, and Paige West, who managed the map tracker application. I couldn’t be prouder to say that I know and work with these talented people.

UPDATE: Reporter Bill Dedman talked with Poynter about how the project came together – nice behind the scenes look.