ASTORIA (AP) - Spiderman has nothing on these guys.

Superheroes? Not really. But eight engineers from Ohio, specially trained in rock-climbing techniques, came to Astoria at the mouth of the Columbia River to do a bolt-by-bolt, rivet-by-rivet inspection of the part of 5.5-mile Astoria Megler Bridge linking Oregon and Washington that spans the shipping channel.

Using ropes and harnesses, they climbed the upper truss and rappelled down to the trestle and the steel tower supports, getting a close-up look.

For a week they checked paint and looked for cracks and other structural problems, said Jeff Swanstrom, senior bridge inspector for Oregon Department of Transportation.

It happens every two years, but this year was different.

Usually state inspectors do much of the work and hire specialists like those from Burgess & Niple to check places they can't reach.

"It's important we look at these bridges every couple years in this environment," Swanstrom told the Daily Astorian newspaper. "All (parts) are prone to fatigue or cracking, and if there was a problem with any of those members it could cause partial collapse. ... I inspected the bridge for years before these guys came out here.

"What we couldn't reach, they inspected. Now we're asking them to do the whole thing because we wanted a really good look at the bridge."

Inspectors need to get within 24 inches of the bridge members, which means climbing the steel with ropes.

"This is the only way we can access the whole bridge," said Swanstrom. "We've tried with boom lifts but it was too difficult."

Height wasn't the only problem on the weeklong job.

"They had to work around nesting peregrine falcons," Swanstrom said. "It's getting to the end of nesting season."

With the $60,000 job completed, the team will tell the state what they found.

Swanstrom said he already knows they've found corrosion - the result of exposure to saltwater and lots of rain, which reaffirms the need for the $20 million paint job Oregon and Washington have planned over the next two years.

The north span alone will require new paint on 500,000 square feet of steel. Some rivets are completely rusted out.

The underside of the bridge will be sandblasted down to the metal before it is repainted while the upper portion will be pressure washed and treated. Because the old paint contains lead, the contractor must seal off the work area to prevent contaminants from falling into the river.

Steve Carter, assistant ODOT district manager in Astoria, said the inspectors were spending about 11 hours a day on the bridge.

The job is called a "fracture-critical structural inspection," he said.

"They're getting to within an arm's reach of everything," Carter said during the inspection.

"This will give us thorough, hands-on understanding of how the members are doing, how much corrosion there is, how the paint's doing, and keep the traffic going to the other side of the river."