The Laboratorio Nacional de Materiales y Modelos Estructurales (Lanamme) accuses the Consejo Nacional de Vialidad (Conavi) – National Roads Authority – of neglecting important road work and focusing on “plugging up” potholes instead.
Luis Guillermo Loria, program coordinator of Transport (PITRA), a division of the LANAMME, said Transport officials concentrate on paving over problem areas with a coat of asphalt, rather than fixing them.
The weekend collapse of the Interamericana, in the area of the Cambroneno and the Circunvalación between Pavas and the Hatillos is a result of this neglect says Loria.
The engineer stated that to properly repair the major problems requires different contracts and not the “maintenance contracts” the Conservación Vial (Road Maintenance) grants to local contractors.
Loria is of the beleif that if the CONAVI had gone about repairing the problems there wouldn’t be a collapse of the country’s road network, and we would have avoided road closures and other problems that we are all living daily.
For LANAMME, the responsibility to repair the problems cannot be done with contracts and by companies hired to carry out maintenance work. In addition, there is also a need for supervisory inspectors.
Loria points out an interesting coincidence that the same contractor, the H. Solís company, is responsible for the road maintenance of kilometre 77 of the Interamericana Norte (Ruta 1) that collapsed on Sunday and the Circuvalación in the area of Hatillo 8, that collapsed last September.
In fact, points out the LANAMME, the H. Solís company has 13 of the 22 maintenance contracts.
