Alberta’s Auditor General, Merwan Saher, has released his findings of an audit on the managing of structural safety of bridges in our province.
Five auditors spent several months assessing if the Department of Transportation has effective systems to manage the structural safety of the 4,400 bridges and culverts in Alberta.
While Saher didn’t find any unsafe bridges, the report outlines a number of deficiencies within the system of bridge maintenance and inspection.
“We did find that the design of the system was actually quite good. They did have all of the elements that you would expect to see in a good bridge maintenance system,” said Assistant Auditor General, Jeff Dumont.
However, the report says there is an unnecessarily high risk of unsafe bridges in Alberta, due to the fact that a lot of the protocol that is supposed to be followed, wasn’t.
“The main findings are in fact that several of the processes were not working as they should have, such as the inspections. The inspection practices in terms of the frequency of the inspections, sometimes things that should have been inspected were not inspected on time,” Dumont said adding, “The certification of the inspectors was an issue. At times the certifiers did not have their certification up to the current level.”
The province uses private contractors to inspect bridges in Alberta. The audit found that about half of the 1,700 inspections done in the last fiscal year were done by uncertified inspectors. This has caused concern for the Auditor General, as well as the opposition.
“Because they’ve contracted out their inspections, they’ve kind of lost control,” said NDP Leader Brian Mason.
The province says it has acted on those concerns by refining its process around using certified inspectors, and increasing the number of spot checks, or audits.
Mason maintains that while there is no evidence to prove that Alberta’s bridges are unsafe, there’s also no evidence to prove that they are safe.
“We know that the safeguards that are in place to keep bridges safe aren’t working properly, so eventually we’re going to have a problem,” added Mason.
MPA Engineering Ltd. is one of the companies the province uses for bridge inspections. President Stewart Hagan says all of his inspectors are certified, and is confident in the provincial system. He says the audit shows that the system does work, it just needs to be tweaked.
“The public has to be aware that there is an aging infrastructure problem that’s potentially there, and it’s being looked at and addressed,” said Hagan.
The report outlined nine specific concerns which the Department of Transportation must address.
They have been given a specific timeline to come up with a plan to address and comply with the concerns.The auditor general will then look at the plan and measure whether or not the province has taken the necessary precautions to rectify the concerns.
With files from Vassy Kapelos.