Sask. council spurned grant, adopted cheaper bridge design
REGINA — The Saskatchewan municipality where a newly built bridge collapsed hours after opening had been approved for $750,000 in provincial funding to go toward construction, but opted for a less expensive design, a rural leader says.
The Dyck Memorial Bridge in the Rural Municipality of Clayton opened to traffic Sept. 14, but collapsed into the Swan River later that day. No one was hurt and the contractor is responsible for repairs.
The Saskatchewan Association of Rural Municipalities said Tuesday that Clayton applied last fall for funding through the province’s municipal roads program that the association administers.
The project received preliminary approval in January from a project management board.
Over the next several months, the association requested engineering criteria from Clayton, but didn’t receive it, said executive director Jay Meyer. Clayton was given a week-long extension to July 20, but the information still didn’t come in, he said.
If it had been built through the municipal road program, the total cost of the bridge would have been $1.1 million.
The maximum the program could allocate was $750,000, which left Clayton on the hook for $350,000.
“[The municipal council] felt the bridge that fell under the program was too expensive,” Meyer said Tuesday.
In a Sept. 24 interview, Clayton Reeve Duane Hicks said the cost for his municipality to independently replace the bridge through builder Can-Struct Systems Inc. was about $340,000.
Hicks said the bridge was built to Canadian safety standards, though no geotechnical investigation was performed on the riverbed under the bridge before it was built.