Business View Magazine | December 2019

124 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE DECEMBER 2019 AT A GLANCE AIT BRIDGES WHAT: A provider of innovative and low-cost, composite bridge solutions WHERE: Brewer, Maine WEBSITE: www.aitbridges.com AIT BRIDGES A ccording to the American Road and Transportation Builders Association, there are about 614,387 bridges across the United States. Today, 245,000 of them are older than their 50-year intended design life; of those, about 235,000 are in need of rehabilitation or replacement; and of those, some 47,000 are structurally deficient and in immediate need of replacement. But bridge replacement doesn’t come cheap. The most recent estimate puts the nation’s backlog of bridge rehabilitation needs at $123 billion. While the infrastructure sector continues to await the federal funding that will kick-start a wave of new construction, a recent entry into this potentially burgeoning marketplace is AIT Bridges, a division of Advanced Infrastructure Technologies, and, today, the leading provider of innovative and low-cost, composite bridge solutions. AIT started as the brainchild of Dr. Habib Dagher, a Professor of Civil/Structural Engineering at the University of Maine’s Composite Research facility, who came up with the product line after years of research and development work, and with the support of the National Science Foundation, the Department of Defense, the U.S. Department of Transportation, and the Army Corps of Engineers, among others. The Composite Arch Bridge System is AIT Bridges’ first product and service offering. The system consists of fiberglass reinforced plastic (FRP) tubular elements, FRP decking, and a headwall supported by cast-in-place or precast footing. “We discovered the product in ’08 as they were building the first demonstration bridge,” recounts Company Co-Founder & CEO, Brit Svoboda. “I liked this product and we were able to negotiate a license agreement. We formed a company and that was the beginning of Advanced Infrastructures Technology, Inc. COMPOSITE SOLUTIONS