business

You can't get to the Corredor Norte or Albrook on the overpass that starts on the Balboa side near the old train station as shown above. At least, not by driving a motor vehicle. However this reporter, armed with a cheap throw-away camera, did cross this bridge on foot, view it from a distance and inspect it from below.

Understand that the reporter is neither a civil engineer nor someone educated or employed in construction industry. He does, however, count on a number of years of experience as a city council member and member of the building code appeals board in Ypsilanti, Michigan, during which times he was obliged to learn about various construction problems.

The problems with this overpass are rather obvious, but their severity is not. Here we have a road that was finished some time ago, but which has not been allowed to be opened for traffic. That would give one clue about how bad the problem is, but a more definitive evaluation awaits an investigation ordered by President Torrijos and being carried out by the Ministry of Public Works (MOP) and the Panamanian Society of Engineers and Architects (SPIA).

A competent building inspection starts from below, with the foundations. Approached that way, we see in the photo above a disturbing sign --- the red clay around these pillars has been churned up, so that it is difficult to see whether and to what extent they are sinking. But looking up from this morass (see the photo below), there are the tell-tale signs of cracks in the bridge structure that have been plastered over.

In the above photo there are also signs that the soil has been disturbed around another set of the overpass's pillars --- and in this case anyone who has over the past several months taken taken a daytime city bus ride to the national bus terminal in Albrook is likely to have seen how work crews were busy excavating around the pillars, filling the holes back up with material and tamping the new fill dirt down with machines.

Viewed from afar, one can see what appears to be a retroactively built thicker part of the overpass rail, just to the left of the road sign and above a set of pillars in the photo above. In fact, there is a slight but perceptible appearance that the bridge is sagging at that point.

On closer inspection atop the overpass, one will notice that one side of this expansion joint is about one-quarter of an inch higher than the other.

And then there's no hiding the many big cracks on the top side of the overpass...

... not even by painting over them.

What's the basic problem? It is a fact that a century or so ago, the place where this overpass was built was a mangrove swamp, bisected by a stream. The swamp was filled in with dirt and the stream was diverted into tubes running under the landfill. The overpass's next-door neighbor, the pumping station shown above, ought to have been a clear reminder of the nature of this construction site.

This overpass was built over squishy ground, and whether as the result of corrupt motives to save costs by cutting corners on this public works project or due to sheer incompetence, the bridge's foundations were not built as solidly as they should have been. Thus the sinking pillars, thus the sag, thus the cracks.

The short term decision facing the new government is whether the problems with this overpass can be corrected and the work can be safely opened for traffic, or whether the unused $5.5 million structure needs to be partially or totally demolished. The overpass, which was scheduled to be opened for public use two years ago, is safe and ready for use at any time, according to DYWIDAG, the project's general contractor. As this issue of The Panama News was uploaded, MOP and SPIA had yet to release their opinions on this matter.

In the longer term, this fiasco will likely provide gainful employment to a number of lawyers.

Also in this section:
Business & Economy Briefs
Blades at AMCHAM
Torrijos planning austerity measures
The problems with the Albrook-Balboa overpass
Luciani tapped to head Seguro Social

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