Probe Ordered of Faulty O.C. Bridge Welds

A state legislative committee Monday ordered an investigation into how Caltrans allowed faulty welds in the 3-year-old bridges of the Orange Crush interchange, a problem that transportation officials say will cost about $4 million to fix.

“I want answers,” said Assemblyman Tom Torlakson (D-Antioch), the chairman of the state Assembly’s transportation committee. “How could this happen?”

State and local officials were reacting Monday to a Times report that bridges in the busy interchange of the Santa Ana, Orange and Garden Grove freeways contained flimsy welds that Caltrans acknowledged could fail in a Northridge-sized earthquake.

“You have a $71-million investment and here you haven’t made it earthquake-safe,” Torlakson said of the massive interchange project. “We have so precious few transportation dollars. To waste them on mistakes is wrong.”

Assemblyman Lou Correa (D-Anaheim), a member of the transportation committee, said he supports the inquiry.

“My first gut reaction was, ‘Who was at fault here?’ ” Correa said. “I can’t begin to imagine the terrible problems it would cause if the Orange Crush was down. We need to fix it and fix it quickly.”

Tests earlier this year revealed that seven of 56 welds from Orange Crush bridge columns failed at pressures lower than they were designed to withstand. Although Caltrans has not determined how many of the 2,400 welds in the Orange Crush bridges are bad, they say they will go ahead and pay the estimated $4 million to find and fix them.

The repair project is scheduled to begin in December.

Chipping away the concrete from the bridge columns to expose the welds will require lane closures, slowing traffic through the busy interchange. More than 189,000 cars travel through the crossroads of the Santa Ana, Orange and Garden Grove freeways each day.

Caltrans’ engineers say there is little danger of a collapse. The bridges were designed with newer techniques than the bridges that toppled during the Northridge earthquake in 1994, or the Loma Prieta quake 10 years ago. Still, Caltrans believes the Orange Crush weld problem is severe enough to warrant a major overhaul. It is the only location targeted for repairs following a statewide review of 1,100 bridges containing a similar type of weld.

“They wrongly assumed that our bridges were OK because they were relatively new, only 3 years old,” said Orange County Supervisor Todd Spitzer, who serves on the county’s transportation authority board.

“This retrofit could have significant impacts on our motoring public. We want to make sure that this retrofit happens as soon as possible with the least amount of impact,” he said. “This could inconvenience the entire county.”

Spitzer on Monday asked for an accounting of all Orange County bridges to make certain the same weld problems don’t exist elsewhere. He was also amazed that Caltrans until recently allowed welding companies to hire their own inspectors--a process that Spitzer called “an outrageous conflict of interest.”

Inspection Rules Not Enforced

Managers of the company that X-rayed welds on the Orange Crush said they did their job.

“We submitted the film, all of the X-rays, that we took every night,” said Richard Guerrerio, the former president of SGS U.S. Testing. “Caltrans had every opportunity to inspect that work every morning.” In sworn testimony earlier this year, a Caltrans inspector said that the agency did not enforce rules that require officials to inspect materials before, during and after they were welded. When asked why he allowed a Los Angeles County bridge project to continue, the inspector, Robert Councilman, replied: “Because that was not being enforced on any project at that time.” Councilman’s testimony was part of a deposition in a contractor’s lawsuit against Caltrans.

Caltrans officials concede that inspectors with inadequate training missed the substandard welds when the Orange Crush bridges were being built.

However, Caltrans insists the contractors are still responsible for delivering a quality product--even if state procedures were flawed and oversight was lacking.

“There were a number of flaws in the process,” Caltrans spokesman Jim Drago said.

Still, Caltrans insists the contractors are still responsible for delivering a quality product--even if state procedures were flawed and oversight was lacking.

“The fact is that taxpayers paid for something to be at one level, and they got something that was of a lower standard,” Drago said. “When you hire someone to do work, you expect that work to be done to the specifications that you order.”

Caltrans will replace the faulty Orange Crush welds, then decide whether to require the contractor to help pay for the repairs, Drago said. However, a vice president for Kiewit Pacific Inc., the general contractor on the Orange Crush bridge project, said the Omaha, Neb., company is unaware of any problems with the welds.

John Gladych, a Newport Beach attorney who represents Mejia Steel Welding, the firm that welded rebars for the Orange Crush project and two others that have drawn scrutiny, said Caltrans inspectors were struggling mightily to keep up with a crush of work.

“They were trying to do it. They were inspecting and reviewing the X-rays but they didn’t know what they were looking at,” Gladych said. “What happened was that Caltrans undertook this massive retrofit without properly staffing or educating their staff.”

Supervisor Tom Wilson, the chairman of the Orange County Transportation Authority, said public safety should always be the government’s primary concern.

“The sorry part about this is that these things are preventable,” Wilson said. “Why have these things inspected if indeed problems are going to slip through? It certainly is a waste of time, energy and money and it puts the public at risk.” Weld problems have surfaced before in Southern California, including the press box at the Los Angeles County Coliseum and at the Kenneth Norris Jr. Comprehensive Cancer Center in Los Angeles, where welds cracked during the Northridge earthquake.

*

Times staff writer Megan Garvey contributed to this report