What Recourse do Governments Have for Shoddy Hwy Projects

[Abscraperguy]

I realize this question may be jurisdiction specific but I'm curious how poor workmanship is handled in your areas. Following is the background to my question.

A very large and well known road construction company has done two major projects within 60 miles of me within the last 15 years. In both cases within two years it became VERY obvious that the workmanship was garbage. One example is, the highway will have a 6-12 "dish" the width of the hwy and anywhere from 4-12 ft wide. This "dish" can happen up to six times a mile and then sometimes none for a few miles. This gets to be a safety issue as well as extremely hard on vehicles and passengers. Our highways department has expended much effort to fix these problems to no avail. Do state or provincial governments have any options for?
1. requiring the original contractor to repair at his cost?
2. insurance against rogue contractors?
3. permanently banning a corporation from government projects without lots of legal wrangling?

 

[Scrub Puller]

Yair . . . Abscraperguy. Sounds like you similar issues to what we have here . . . our main highway is breaking up before the machinery has moved off site!

I don't know how the system works these days but, in my time of doing government jobs there was a maintenance clause that could be invoked to cover pavement failures and what all.

It seems to me that the "manufactured" road base in use now is inferior to the old "run of the ridge" gravel and on top of that there seem to be relaxed standards of compaction.

We used to slam it in to a couple of inches above grade with water ballasted 8 foot diameter sheepsfoot that made a D8 work. It was rolled until the roller walked out and rumbled . . . hard work to cut it back to grade with a then new Cat 12.

I see them do a few passes these days with a pizzy little vibrating Cat or what all and next thing they're spraying emulsion . . . c'mon, it's not hard to see why it fails . . . them's my thoughts anyway. (big grin)

Cheers.

 

[Red Roan]

Highway work here is controlled by PennDot, our state highway department.. They have a very rigid pre-qualification process which virtually eliminates any " rogue" contractors. They also have intensive inspection and testing procedures. Anytime I bid a highway job, for every hour we will be working, I enter a cost of 70.00/ hr. for one of their on site inspectors. And yes, the contractor must bear the cost in most cases.

And, depending on the project, there are maintenance bonds required for a set period after construction. At least one year, sometimes more.

If you pass their inspections, and it's out of the maintenance bond period and fails, it's their baby.

And as long as you performed the job to their criteria, even if it were to fail afterwards, if they tried to "black ball" you, they'd
have a law suit on their hands.

Shoddy workmanship and road failures are much more common on township and secondary roads where the pre-qualification/inspection process is not so rigid.

 

[CM1995]

The question is similar to asking what does a car cost?

I don't do HWY work and probably never will as it's a large contractors realm that has the support staff to meet all the requirements and shuffle all the required paperwork.

Specs and contracts are written that specify in detail (or they should) about how the project is to be constructed. Multiple levels of inspections are performed to insure the specs are adhered to. Personally I think this is where the breakdown is and the reason why some projects have failures - common sense is not commonly used anymore.

As Scrub described, they knew the material and how to work it. I have been on commercial jobs where the yellow box said the dirt was at 85% compaction yet the feet were riding high on the compactor and tri-axles grossing 80K weren't leaving even the slightest indentation, only to find out they had the wrong proctor.ointhead

Conversely, I have had material pumping so bad that loaded tri-axles were leaving 6" ruts but the yellow box said 98%. :beatsme

Contractors are bound to the testing/inspection guys to sign off on their work. If it doesn't pass they don't get paid, regardless of the validity of the test reports. That's why I prefer negotiated work with repeat clients and a testing lab that I know very well. If we run across problems that doesn't look right (like the 98% compaction on what is clearly not holding up) we all back up and find what the problem is, in order to achieve the desired goal.

However on other jobs it's not the same. The testing lab is king and the owner expects reports meeting specs. This is where I see the breakdown. The owner sets the rules and everyone involved has to play by them if they want to get paid, HWY jobs are no different. Common sense and knowledge is set to the side in trade for reports and test results. Most of the time this is an efficient system and produces well constructed projects however, just like a computer - garbage in = garbage out.


Of course don't forget the political side of the road building business but that's another topic. The "good ol' boy" system is alive and well in my State, politically connected firms dominate the road contracts.

 

[Scrub Puller]

Yair . . . CM1995. Spot on comments about the compaction variations.

In a later life I worked a while on housing developments in civilisation and overloaded tandem tippers would leave wheel tracks across finished road-base but yet the bitumen went on because it was signed off on the tests said its okay.

Cheers.

 

[245dlc]

I'm working on a highway project right now and it's a fairly major highway in this region and most of the problems we're having is just the **** poor material the Provincial Engineers spec for base. I got a good laugh when I saw the first lift of granular was little more than fill sand, playing dumb I asked the inspector why are you using sand? He said to more that's called 'granular fill' to which I replied the same thing is used in sewer and water and called 'fill sand'. There is widely available crushed limestone in this region but the Department of Holidays as the Highways Department is known here is always trying to save a buck so they try to get away with using 'C' base and 'A' base gravel which is terrible for wicking up water and turning to mush its quite pathetic how they build or rebuild roads in this province.

 

[oceanobob]

Much better to do as the spec & drawings say to the point where RFI's (requests for information) are detailed for clarity etc etc than to try and 'engineer' one's own solution.

Seems there is little to gain and much to lose.

 

[Tones]

Hey Scrub Puller, our local hwy was rebuilt about 7 years ago and now it's in a worse state than before the rebuild. The job was done by Road Tek the state government agency. I couldn't agree with you more about the quality of the gravels used. The Romans had better road building skills 2000 years ago than are being used today

 

[245dlc]

See if these pictures load up, this is a bridge on a major highway in the area it's a divided highway and one of the two bridges has finally had a tender go out for replacement but it's quite appalling at how they let things get so out of hand. The piers have had to have braces put in to keep the bridge sections from having no support basically 'H' piles driven in with a beam put across, the Province has already had one bridge fail and had to rebuild a portion of it when a pier pushed over from a river bank failure. And they demolished another and flatly refused to build another because a pier was failing.

 

[8k bill]

Hey Scrub Puller, our local hwy was rebuilt about 7 years ago and now it's in a worse state than before the rebuild. The job was done by Road Tek the state government agency. I couldn't agree with you more about the quality of the gravels used. The Romans had better road building skills 2000 years ago than are being used today

Hey Tones, same up this way mate...we've got stretches of road that edges hold about 3" of water near the fog line and near pulls you off the road! Very dangerous. They've definitely lost the art in road building alright. :beatsme

 

[Scrub Puller]

Yair . . . Tones, 8kbill . Makes you wonder alright.

I never was a grader hand but a bloke who was told me fifty years ago that you can't finish up to level you have to slightly overfill and cut it down to grade . . . these days I watch graders working a finish pass with the gravel segregating out across the blade and then they hit with the roller . . . . buggered if I know, it is a whole different game and it doesn't work.

You would think on the Bruce they would bash it in a bit harder, I watched Megalift up close and personal humping a D11 on one of their centipede trailers and you could actually see the bitumen bulging in front of the wheels . . . and it wasn't even a hot day.

Cheers.

 

[nicky 68a]

I agree Scrub.Years ago we would often overfill an area with a couple of foot of muck.This was allways with large motorscrapers and D8's pulling big grid or sheepsfoot rollers that do indeed make them bark.We would then leave it until just before final grading and use a couple of good scraper drivers to cut it off again.At Glasgow airport we had to surcharge an entire runway area with a surplus meter of muck that was graded flat and left for a year.If a 631 could run on it then so could a Jumbo.
It would make me wonder to see the compaction test boys trying to take a core sample for compaction testing when a fleet of TS 24's were leaving ruts a meter deep!!!

 

[Buckethead]

The government can debar a contractor from bidding on future work. So it's wise to try to comply with the inspectors.