Lack Of Maintenance Culture Blamed On Enugu’s Collapsed Bridge

The collapsed bridge along Artisan Market in Enugu on Monday was caused by lack of maintenance culture and improper projects execution.

Nick Uzonsi, former council chairman of Udi local government of Enugu State and highway engineer, stated this while reacting to the incident. He further advised the federal government to concession road and bridge maintenance to states where such roads are domiciled.

He said, “I witnessed the collapse of that flyover. Nigeria has a very bad attiude when it comes to maintenance. What happened to that bridge did not start that day. The bridge abutment had hitherto been threatened by erosion.

“In the ministry of works, we have evaluation units. It is their duty to know which bridge is being eroded. I doubt if anybody from the ministry had inspected that bridge for over a decade. We have what we call design life. Here, the number of years for maintenance is stated. There is also the projected vehicle load. The current load on that bridge was beyond its capacity.

“Again, there have been a lot of human activities around that bridge. Cattle are being grazed, sands being removed, farming activities are also ongoing, and the supervising ministry is just looking.

“The apron caved in, and nobody talked, and water continued to sip in. A lot is needed to be done in terms of construction maintenance in Nigeria. The geo-technical implications should be considered. It should be stated how many years a bridge should stay before maintenance comes in.”

He said the only way out was to allow states to maintain federal road infrastructure in their domains with the supervision of the federal agencies to ensure quality control.

He however, condemned corrupt practices associated with states rehabilitating federal roads.

According to him, “There are cases where states will construct about two kilometres of federal roads, and bribe the federal supervisors to escalate it to fifty kilometres. Such destroyed previous arrangements where states got refunded when they fixed federal roads.”

A social commentator, Engr Paul Mbah, said, “Almost all federal roads and bridges in South East are time bombs waiting to explode because of dilapidation and lack of maintenance. The only way out is total reconstruction of those projects.

“The states should be more proactive because the state of these roads and bridges is impacting negatively on state economies.

“Another solution is making rail transportation available. Heavy duty vehicles ply on these roads on a daily basis. Much of the load could better be conveyed on rail, thus reducing the dilapidation of these vulnerable roads and bridges. I still wonder why ex-president Buhari chose to construct a rail network from Nigeria to Niger instead of linking various regions of the country by rail.”

Our correspondent reports that the collapsed Enugu bridge is a federal project, and its collapse has brought untold hardship to motorists who currently navigate makeshift road networks as the affected route has been completely cut off.