Another $4.6 million to be spent on botched Airport Parkway bridge
Posted Dec 4, 2013 01:41:21 AM.
This article is more than 5 years old.
OTTAWA – The city’s finance committee has approved spending another $4.65 million to fix the failed Airport Parkway pedestrian bridge, bringing the total price tag of the project to more than $10 million.
The bridge was partially torn down in 2011 due to faulty concrete and then this fall the city fired the company that designed the bridge due to concerns with design.
The project is now expected to be completed by November 2014 and at a news conference Tuesday afternoon, Mayor Jim Watson admitted he’s embarrassed.
“I’m frustrated and angry that this project has gone so completely off the rails,” Watson told reporters, outside his office.
A review of the project by a specialized bridge engineering firm revealed the bridge design had serious design flaws which would almost certainly result in its collapse.
Genivar, the engineering firm which designed the bridge, has been banned from bidding on city contracts for the next two years.
Delcan, which has taken over the troubled project, plans to abandon the faulty design and build the bridge with conventional multi-strand cable stays.
Mayor Watson said a third-party review of the project will be conducted to determine what went wrong in this process, so that this fiasco won’t be repeated.
“About a week or so ago I was at a point where I was ready to say just bulldoze the damn thing because I was so fed up with this non-stop series of embarrassments,” said Watson.
His comments echo River Ward Councillor Maria McRae, who called the bridge a “monumental failure” at Tuesday’s Finance and Economic Development Committee meeting.
The pedestrian bridge, which was originally supposed to be finished by the end of 2011, is now set to completed by November 2014.
