Caltrans Had Only 1 Inspector to Review State’s Weld X-Rays

As Caltrans raced to spend $4 billion to build and seismically retrofit bridges across the state, the agency had just one overworked inspector sifting through hundreds of thousands of X-rays of critical welded joints, a top Caltrans official acknowledged Monday.

“Quite frankly, we didn’t have enough trained inspectors to handle the volume of work,” Jim Roberts, chief deputy director of Caltrans, said at a legislative hearing in Santa Ana.

Caltrans now estimates that it will cost at least $1.8 million to replace welds in critical regions of 18 bridge columns of the Orange Crush, the notoriously congested interchange where the Santa Ana, Orange and Garden Grove freeways meet. Beginning in December or January, 700 welds will be cut out and replaced with mechanical couplers, the agency has said.

Caltrans estimates that the work will take eight to nine months, with any lane closures occurring at night to minimize traffic disruptions.

While a majority of the Orange Crush welds are probably adequate, Caltrans officials do not know for sure, Roberts said. While the Orange Crush was designed to withstand a magnitude 6.5 earthquake, hundreds of X-rays of welds taken during the 1994-1995 construction were lost, and many of those salvaged were of poor quality.

“We basically have pictures that are of no value, worthless pieces of film, “ Roberts said. “If we could read these radiographs, we wouldn’t have a problem.”

While construction was underway, Caltrans had just one inspector in Sacramento trained to read X-rays of welds. Field inspectors lacked training to recognize bad welds from good welds, a situation that has since been corrected, Roberts said.

“There were hundreds of thousands of welds, and one guy couldn’t keep up,” Roberts said.

Caltrans did not anticipate the enormous repercussions of having only one qualified X-ray expert, Roberts said. That was because the use of welding mushroomed with the acceleration of the state’s seismic retrofit program and because the agency had transferred much of its responsibility for inspections to private contractors.

Caltrans assumed that the contractors were doing high-quality work, he said.

State Assemblyman Lou Correa (D-Anaheim), who organized Monday’s hearing, said he was outraged to learn of the weld problems at the Orange Crush, particularly after the collapse of the Santa Monica freeway during the Northridge earthquake of 1994.

“We’ve got to make sure that this kind of stuff doesn’t happen,” said the legislator, who called the session to question Caltrans officials about the quality of construction on the Orange Crush after The Times reported last month that 1 in 8 welds failed tests earlier this year. State Sen. Joe Dunn (D-Santa Ana) also attended.

Dunn, a member of the Senate Transportation Committee, plans a hearing next week in Downey with Caltrans officials on permits for oversize vehicles. In July, an Orange County motorist was killed when a rig struck an overpass 2 inches too low for the permitted load. A 7,000-pound fuel tank fell off the truck, crushing the man’s car. Caltrans had issued a permit to the truck driver.

Next month, the Assembly Transportation Committee, of which Correa is a member, will conduct a more formal hearing on Caltrans inspections, welds and bridge construction.

Correa pledged to introduce legislation next year that would require Caltrans to provide more thorough inspections on construction projects. “There’s a role here for inspectors from the government,” he said. If approved, the measure would further reverse an eight-year trend to make contractors responsible for inspections.

As a cost-cutting measure under former Gov. Pete Wilson, Caltrans laid off about 100 workers in 1995 at the height of the Orange Crush construction, Roberts said: “We hadn’t hired anybody for about three years.”

Some argue that those savings are now costing millions. Although Caltrans withheld $2.5 million in payments to contractors, those companies have filed 39 claims contending that Caltrans should pay because it changed the rules after construction began, requiring contractors to have certified weld inspectors on the job. Only a few of those cases have settled.

Another $20 million has been held up pending resolution of a dispute over problem welds at the Mission Valley interchange of Interstates 8 and 805 in San Diego.

“At the end of the day, it’s always the taxpayers who get hit with the bill,” Correa said. “If taxpayers spend a buck, I want them to get back the value of a buck.”

The state’s top engineer, Roberts, agreed, saying Caltrans is still on the hook regardless of who does the inspections.

“In the end, it’s our responsibility,” he said.