FAYETTEVILLE -- Washington County Road Department employees apologized during interviews with county investigators for subpar bridge construction that has roiled county government for months.
Hundreds of pages of interview transcripts show the people in charge of bridges -- from the county judge to the bridge crew lead man -- trusted each other's judgment without asking questions and digging into whether the county had the capability to build bridges on the scale of the rural Harvey Dowell and Stonewall bridges.
County Judge Marilyn Edwards and Road Department employees spoke with Justice of the Peace Eva Madison and Assessor Russell Hill in late April and early May, with engineer and volunteer consultant Carl Gales occasionally present. The Quorum Court directed the trio to find out why county workers improperly set steel and cast concrete at the bridges, perhaps shortening the bridges' lifespans.
Harvey Dowell Bridge stands outside southeast Fayetteville and was built in 2013, while the still-incomplete Stonewall Bridge sits just west of Prairie Grove's city limits.
'We are sorry'
The interviews often mentioned the bridge supervisor, Bill Reed, who retired in March after 28 years working for the county.
Edwards, who oversees the Road Department and a dozen other departments, said she never questioned if the county could handle the Harvey Dowell project when it began in early 2013.
"There was never discussion, because Bill Reed had been with the county for 28 years. He had been building bridges," Edwards said, according to the transcript. "I've got people that I rely on to do what they're supposed to do, and they didn't do it."
Road Superintendent Donnie Coleman and former bridge crew lead man Hayden Wagnon echoed Edwards, saying they trusted Reed's experience. Assistant Superintendent Shawn Shrum said Reed and Wagnon told him the bridges were being built "per plan."
Crews sometimes drilled holes in dry concrete and stuck in un-anchored steel rebar instead of casting the concrete around the rebar because the county always had done it that way, Wagnon said. Rebar by convention must be bonded to the concrete so it doesn't rip out under stress and allow a structure to collapse. The engineering plans call for an interlocking cage of rebar within the concrete as well.
No quality-control testing of Harvey Dowell's concrete was done, according to the investigators.
"Like I said, that's how Bill was taught, that's how we was taught," said Wagnon, who left the county shortly after his two-hour interview April 23 to take a job with the Arkansas Highway and Transportation Department. "The county has built bridges like this forever."
Wagnon said the work at Harvey Dowell was "chaos," with workers and their supervisors feeling rushed and sometimes unsure of the plans and how to follow them.
During his interview, Wagnon read a letter from the rest of the bridge crew apologizing for the work. He and Reed were the only bridge crew employees willing or able to speak with the investigators, Madison has said.
"We are sorry for the mistake on the piers at Stonewall (Bridge) and sorry that the Quorum Court is angry," Wagnon said. "If we can do anything, just let us know."
Reed took responsibility for some of the errors. The rebar in the piers' bases, or footers, didn't extend far enough up into the piers, for example, he said. He also acknowledged rebar was sometimes drilled into concrete and the underlying rock without epoxy or some other anchor to hold it in place on Harvey Dowell and parts of Stonewall.
"I guess I'd have to take the blame for that," Reed said during his interview of more than two hours. "I'll own up to my mistakes, even though I thought I was doing the right thing."
Reed said he retired because of health problems, adding he would still be working if he could.
Reed explained rebar was drilled down into the rock under the pier footings in order to prevent the piers from being pushed sideways by the surrounding water, something he said he'd learned from experience. Keeping water away from the concrete was a major problem during construction, he said.
The rebar wasn't anchored because the steel is too heavy to float, Reed said. But rebar is also anchored to prevent it from being pulled out if the pier tips over. Reed and the investigators didn't raise this possibility during the interview.
Reed said he'd never been trained on how to read engineering plans, receiving mostly on-the-job training from his supervisors and predecessors.
His first major bridge was the Bethel Blacktop span west of Farmington, which was built in 2007. Engineer Jim Beatty's designs for the bridge had to be adjusted frequently because they gave wrong dimensions and had other mistakes, Reed said. He said the county didn't have a survey system at the time for such designs. It was the first county bridge project Reed knew of with engineered plans.
Reed said he was confident in the county's bridge building capability during the bridges' construction and shrugged off concerns from a few workers it wasn't being done right.
"Everybody and their dog is the world's best engineers. Everybody gives advice," Reed said with a smile, according to the transcript. "I've even had advice from people that wouldn't know which way was up."
Reed and others also spread some responsibility to other supervisors in the department.
Reed said he never hid any of his methods and Coleman and Shrum knew what he was doing, for instance. Shrum said he was mostly involved only in the beginning of construction with permits and the like. Coleman said he deferred to Reed because Reed had worked longer for the county than him.
Edwards said she told the department to get approval from Beatty before making any changes to the designs. Shrum gave at least one instance when that wasn't done.
The designs for both bridges call for curbs and short concrete walls along the side to help prevent a vehicle from driving off of it. Crews instead welded on a steel guardrail and narrowed the bridge by 4 feet in both cases.
Shrum said he asked Beatty about the change only after crews had moved on to Stonewall.
"'Jim,' I said, 'we don't have the ability to do that,' the way he had drawn them up in these plans," Shrum said.
Edwards, Coleman, former Chief of Staff Dan Short, Shrum, Reed and asphalt Supervisor Jeff Crowder are all named in at least one of two lawsuits against the county. George Braswell, a department employee, claims he was ignored and punished for pointing out problems with the bridges' construction. Former employee Brandon Holland claims he was retaliated against for supporting Edwards' opponent for county judge last year.
The county has denied Braswell's claims and hadn't responded to Holland's by Friday in U.S. District Court in Fayetteville. Trial for Braswell's suit is scheduled for April 2016.
Improvements and changes
Bridge work steadily improved as it transitioned from Harvey Dowell to Stonewall last fall, Wagnon said. Letters from Braswell prompted questions from local media and drew the department's attention to the lack of epoxy and other methods.
Wagnon said he took on more responsibility in preparation for Reed's retirement and worked at a slower pace during the construction of Stonewall. At least one end wall on the Stonewall Bridge was built exactly as called for in the plans, Wagnon said.
With Wagnon's departure, Reed's retirement and the resignation of two other bridge crew members, only three crew members remain. They've refused to go back to Stonewall without a supervisor and are instead doing maintenance work on other bridges, Edwards said in her interview.
"They're very stressed out," she said, pointing to intense public scrutiny over the bridges. "They just feel like the harassment and the stress is just more than they can handle."
Edwards on Thursday told the Quorum Court she's in the process of hiring a temporary bridge supervisor who will oversee the completion of Stonewall along with Beatty and the engineering firm GTS Inc. Work to reinforce and retrofit Harvey Dowell to get it to its planned strength will be bid out to a private contractor, she said.
She announced several changes at the Road Department to improve bridge safety and the department's management. Other changes, such as demotions or re-assignments, won't come until after she's finished wading through all 1,400 pages of the transcripts, Edwards said Thursday.
The Quorum Court has appeared to be content with the changes so far, particularly the blending of work by outside, private contractors with county bridge employees.
"I think it's a great approach," said Robert Dennis, a Republican justice of the peace who lives in Prairie Grove just a few miles from Stonewall Bridge. He praised the "hybrid" model and said county workers and contractors should always work together.
"They (county workers) would pick up from those guys' tricks and good things," Dennis said Friday. "They wouldn't see how Bill Reed would do it. They'd see how Sweetser Construction does it.
"Bill Reed's not a bad guy. He's a good guy," Dennis added. "But he said he learned it from somebody else."
Going outside the county could break the cycle of outdated construction methods, Dennis said.
Sue Madison, a Fayetteville Democrat and Eva Madison's mother, said Friday the county should also inspect its own bridges more often than the state Highway Department, which comes by every year or two. Eva Madison and Dennis said the same Thursday evening.
Reed said during his interview he also supported outside involvement.
"We probably should have been inspected years ago," he said. "There'd probably be a lot more other things we could have got done a little different that'd have been a whole lot safer. And have GTS [Inc.] start doing it now, yes, I think that's a good idea. Yes, it's going to create some more headaches, but the headaches it's going to create is going to be good headaches."
Dan Holtmeyer can be reached at [email protected] and on Twitter @NWADanH.
NW News on 05/25/2015