FAYETTEVILLE -- Washington County's Road Department failed to follow engineers' plans and Arkansas standards while building at least three county bridges, potentially making them less safe and less durable, investigators said Tuesday.
Justice of the Peace Eva Madison, Assessor Russell Hill and private engineer Carl Gales delivered the results of their investigation into the department's work during a special Quorum Court meeting. The Quorum Court last month directed the trio to look into problems at the Harvey Dowell Bridge near Fayetteville and the unfinished Stonewall Bridge outside Prairie Grove.
After interviewing 16 former and current department employees, reviewing work logs and inspecting the bridges, the investigators found crews cast concrete and installed steel reinforcement improperly at both bridges, as well as at an 8-year-old span over the Illinois River on Bethel Blacktop Road west of Farmington. That 50-foot bridge is the last one built comparable to the other two, Madison said.
The deviations have hastened the bridges' deterioration and shortened their useful lifespans, Madison said. For example, an issue called "honeycombing," or empty spaces in concrete pillars in walls, is apparent at all three. Bethel Blacktop and Harvey Dowell also show cracks, despite Harvey Dowell's age of less than two years.
The same two bridges also were built with steel guard rails instead of the concrete curbs and walls called for in their plans, Madison said, making the road narrower and potentially more dangerous. Workers didn't follow proper safety procedures during construction, along with several other workplace concerns.
The investigators said the blame was spread throughout the department's leaders. A lack of necessary training and equipment for employees, confusion over who was in charge of construction and had the plans, and a department culture several employees said quashed questions and complaints all helped lead to the mistakes, they said.
"Let me be clear: Nobody (in interviews) was hiding the fact the plans were not followed," Madison told the Quorum Court, flanked by Hill and Gales. "This was an organizational failure."
"The biggest cause is because no one knew any better," she said. "They didn't have the knowledge, they didn't have the training, they didn't have the tools to build the bridges the county was asking them to build."
Madison emphasized the department's workers want to do good work and were told the county had always worked this way.
"Nobody stopped to ask the question of do we have a bridge crew capable of building a bridge like this," she said. "We just assumed it."
The investigation was the first of any scale into the matter, though it came to public attention months ago, Madison said. Officials in the county judge's office previously said they interviewed some employees about it.
County Judge Marilyn Edwards oversees the Road Department. She placed a 3-ton weight limit on Harvey Dowell in March at the recommendation of its engineer, Jim Beatty, and ordered the incomplete Stonewall to be mostly scrapped and redone under the supervision of Fayetteville firm GTS Inc. Beatty is designing ways to reinforce them as well.
But work at Stonewall has stalled, Edwards and Madison said. The former bridge supervisor retired in March. The bridge crew's lead man resigned during the investigation, as did two crew members. The remaining three workers refuse to go to the site, Edwards said.
"I've got a lot of soul-searching to do, I've got a lot of things to think about," Edwards said. "I want to sit down with the report in front of me. I want to look at everything very carefully."
The justices of the peace agreed the department's culture and inner workings must be overhauled, noting Edwards is the top authority over the department. Perhaps the county should stop building its own bridges, some said, or at least seek private bids. No firm decision was made Tuesday.
"I cannot imagine hiring an engineer to do a drawing of a bridge and then totally disregarding that drawing -- that just blows my mind," said Harvey Bowman, a Springdale Republican. "There's all kinds of quality control procedures out there that must be followed."
Dan Holtmeyer can be reached at [email protected] and on Twitter @NWADanH.
NW News on 05/06/2015