A 29-year employee of the state Department of Transportation has confessed to falsifying dozens of bridge inspection reports since last fall, filing reports for bridges he didn't inspect, said DOT Commissioner Gena Abraham.

The malfeasance may have started just three months after a bridge collapsed in Minneapolis last August, killing 13.

"If one of these bridges were to fail, it could be a death that a family would have to deal with," said Bob Dallas, director of the Governor's Office of Highway Safety.

DOT officials said they have no evidence the bridges are unsafe to Georgia drivers. The staff didn't notice significant bridge problems in previous reports. Bridges are inspected every two years.

All the same, Abraham said, the department has "still got some digging" to do. The previous round of inspections would have been done by the same team because DOT keeps the teams assigned to the same bridges over time.

The two-man inspection team apparently fell behind in their inspections at the end of last year, with a deadline approaching to submit inspection data to the federal government this spring. Steve Henry, DOT's director of operations, said it appeared the team was working, but slowly. In addition, one team member took a great deal of time off, Abraham said.

Abraham said the department will send other inspection crews to inspect the 54 bridges the team leader confessed to lying about, as well as another 68 in Fulton County that raised officials' suspicions and 278 bridges in Gwinnett County that the team had left on its list.

The team had jurisdiction over more than 1,300 bridges in Rockdale, north Fulton, Gwinnett and part of DeKalb counties.

The team supervisor, David Simmons, confronted with inconsistencies in reporting, confessed, Abraham said. Threatened with dismissal, he retired. His partner, a nine-year employee, did not admit falsifying reports, but has resigned.

Dallas, of the highway safety office, said if he saw the inspectors face to face, he would tell them the risk of falsifying the reports was "akin to a drunk driver going out there, getting drunk and getting behind the wheel and possibly going out there and killing people."

Abraham said the department believes the trouble began last fall, because that is when the inspection team's work schedule went out of sync with the number of bridges they said they had worked on. She conceded the department can not know if the team had in fact inspected assigned bridges before that time, only that their work schedule didn't raise questions.

Some of the bridges in question had earlier ratings approaching the "50" threshold where repair would be called for, Henry said.

Larry Kahn, a professor of civil engineering at Georgia Tech, said that the lapses might not be critical because bridge ratings don't often plummet from one inspection to the next.

However, he said, "you can have a condition like a truck make an impact against the side of a bridge and cause significant damage. ... So the requirement for two-year inspection is not a trivial one or an over-expense. "

The discrepancies were discovered after DOT supervisors suspected the team could not have completed the number of inspections they reported in the time available, or traveled as quickly as they said they did between distant bridges.

In one case, they claimed to have inspected 18 bridges in one day.

Simmons could not be reached for comment.

His partner, Gerald Kelsey, would not explain what happened but stressed that Simmons had been his supervisor.

"I'm a victim of circumstances," Kelsey said.

He would not say if he had done anything wrong or if he had been following Simmons' orders, but said that when Simmons took time off, that left him unable to inspect bridges, too.

"I can't inspect a bridge by myself," Kelsey said.

When Simmons was notified he would be fired, he filed for retirement, DOT officials said.

Because Simmons is a "classified" state employee with a sort of tenure in the state system that would make it onerous to undertake termination, DOT's human resources office is allowing him to retire effective this month.

"Gena has made clear to HR staff that in a case of this nature that will not be an option in the future," said Abraham's spokeswoman, Ericka Davis. Generally, offending employees will be fired in the future.

It's unlikely the two men will be charged with a crime, Davis said. The DOT has not found a violation of state or federal laws; only of departmental policy, she said.

After the I-35 bridge collapsed in Minneapolis, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that more than one in five Georgia bridges were considered by the government to be in need of repair or designed to old standards. DOT said that no roads open to traffic were unsafe for the vehicles that travel them. The state said it spent about $100 million a year on bridge maintenance, but would need $2.5 billion to $3 billion to completely rebuild all the deficient bridges.

Davis said the reinspections will be done in-house. The cost in overtime is not yet known.

Abraham said she is creating a new e-mail hotline that anyone can use to send her their concerns: talk2me@dot.ga.gov.

Her aide said the e-mails will go directly to Abraham.

Abraham praised the rest of the inspection office, especially the supervisors who caught the issues.

Transportation Board Chairman Mike Evans said they "let down their fellow employees."

He also said, though, that DOT employees needed to know that "there's a new sheriff in town here at DOT that won't accept or tolerate anything less than what they're supposed to be doing."

Abraham became commissioner Dec. 1.

Evans added, "Now's the time, if people here at DOT know of something that's not right, to let us know."