Old cars and old bridges have a lot in common, says Jim Zacaruk of Stantec Consulting in Regina.
Delayed repairs can cost three or four times the value of the original purchase or construction price.
Speaking to more than 900 delegates at a meeting of the Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities, Zacaruk presented some of the findings of his company’s bridge inspection.
He said the company looked at the health of 404 bridges in the northeastern corner of the province. It recommended that 18 be closed because of unstable conditions. Eleven were closed immediately and seven remain open pending further study.
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All the remaining bridges require work within the next 10 years, Zacuruk said.
The major problems were wood rot, missing bridge elements possibly caused by ice crunching into piers and unstable embankments. The problems are made worse by the age of some of the bridges. At 40 to 60 years old, they are not easily repaired.
Many bridges built in the 1940s and 1950s were positioned directly above the flowing water at that time.
“As we all know in Saskatchewan, our streams like to wander back and forth a little bit. Well, over 50 years, the stream will sometimes butt up against the bridge,” said Zacaruk.
He said that nearly all inspected bridges have exceeded their normal service life.
“That doesn’t mean that they’re going to fall apart tomorrow …. Now that they have gone through their 50 year service life, some of them have failed, some of them are beginning to fail and some of them will continue to fail going into the future. The rate at which that will happen will increase, that’s a guarantee.”
Zacuruk said many bridges in the province will be in workable condition for another 20 years, but repairing all 404 over that time will cost more than replacing them. The average replacement cost of a typical short-span bridge of six to 12 metres is half a million dollars, meaning a total of $200 million to build new ones.
“Keep in mind this $200 million is just dealing with the northeast sector of 404. There have been estimates that there are approximately 2,000 bridges (in Saskatchewan) that fall under the RMs’ jurisdiction …. You can take that 200 million and convert it into a billion,” said Zacuruk.
Erick Erickson of Graham Construction and Engineering told the rural delegates that “we believe that from Stantec’s findings that it’s just a matter of time before a serious accident does occur.”
Erickson said his company proposes a long-term partnership to deliver a bridge replacement program.
Working with SARM, RMs would be responsible for developing a priority list of structures, a portion of funding, and to identify a list of local firms that would want to be involved in the bridge building.
“Just finding the resources to do the number of replacements that are out there is going to be a challenge for anybody, whether that’s individual RMs, or a company such as ourselves, or others that are out there,” said Erickson.
