by Rod Hughes
The collapse of a bridge in Minneapolis, Minn., last week has the whole world thinking of their own country, but to hear the Ministry of Public Works (MOPT) tell it, don’t sweat it. According to Pedro Castro, MOPT’s deputy minister, those bridges are safe but need “updating,” which sounds chillingly like what they said about the Minneapolis bridge before it fell, costing at least five lives.
In today’s edition, the English-language weekly Tico Times goes into the subject deeply, as is that paper’s custom, but the upshot is clear: most of the nation’s bridges are 50 to 80 years old and they are nearing the end of their lifespan.
Despite MOPT’s whistling in the dark, a recent study of bridges by the Japanese International Cooperation Agency paints a different, darker picture. The two-year JICA study revealed that most of the 1,330 bridges in the country suffer from deterioration caused by frequent earth tremors, flooding rivers and traffic for which they were never designed.
The three-volume report takes 29 national highway bridges as examples, citing a litany of problems, ranging from lack of rigidity of floor structure through damaged joints to caveins around abuttments.
The National Emergency Committee director Daniel Gallardo is not buying the “safe but old” MOPT theme, either. “The number of cars on the road has increased five times, but our infrastructure hasn’t kept up,” he told the newspaper.
This reporter is reminded of and experience with the typical Tico attitude of “if it hasn’t fallen yet, it never will.” He was driving a Ford van filled with some local friends in Guanacaste province a couple of decades ago when they came to the wooden bridge over a river near the rural village of Ortega. He got out, walked to the middle of it and found he could make the structure sway just by flexing his knees. His friends, not relishing a walk in the hot sun into Ortega, urged him to drive on. “Even big trucks go over it. Esta bien,” they assured him. “Until the last one,” muttered this reporter.
They walked. But who knows? The same bridge may be still there.
Or maybe not.