December 7, 2009

One-third of Ontario’s bridges in critical need of repair: auditor general

VINCE VERSACE

staff writer

TORONTO

One-third of Ontario’s bridges deemed to be in critical need of repair have no repair plans set for over the next year, the province’s auditor general finds in his latest audit.

Auditor General Jim McCarter states in his 2009 annual report that some Ontario bridges are in poor condition and the province is taking too long to make repairs.

"We found that the Ministry of Transportation (MTO) had no plans to make repairs within the coming year to the more than one-third of the 180 provincial bridges identified, by its own inspectors, as being in critical need of repair within the year," McCarter said in a statement.

There are about 14,800 bridges in Ontario and 2,800 of them are under provincial ownership.

Municipalities own the remaining 12,000 and are responsible for their maintenance.

However, the McCarter report noted that MTO "lacked comprehensive information" about the condition of bridges owned by municipalities.

Among the report’s findings concerning provincially owned bridges:

• In a 2006 training workshop, ministry inspectors and external consultants both commented that their work was challenged by not being able to gain adequate access to perform thorough, close-up inspections of large bridges.

  This issue is particularly serious in the Greater Toronto Area, where there are over 660 bridges on the 400 series of highways and some of them span up to 16 lanes of traffic. Half of these bridges are 40 years or older.

• MTO’s own inspection manual states a typical bridge examination should take at least two to three hours.

  However, the audit found that inspectors often conducted five or more bridge inspections a day and 10 or more bridges were inspected in one day, by a single inspector, on 36 different occasions between 2006 and 2008, raising doubts as to the thoroughness of these inspections.

• MTO’s Bridge Management System did not have information on the rehabilitation history for almost one-third of the bridges that were 40 years old or older.

  MTO confirmed that rehabilitation work had been done on some of these bridges in the last 12 years and detailed information was available in paper files or on the local database, yet none of this work had been entered into the system.

• The auditor general found that in over 60 per cent of contracts it reviewed for design services and construction contract oversight, MTO’s estimate "differed significantly" from that of the selected bidder.

  In many cases, the winning bid was 50 per cent higher than the Ministry’s own initial estimate.

  Contract addenda were found in about 75 per cent of the contracts reviewed for the report and in half of these, the added costs amounted to more than 50 per cent of the original contract price.

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