Bridge Firms Deny Blame As Bakrie Link Emerges.
December 02, 2011
The firms in charge of building and maintaining the Mahakam II Bridge that collapsed and killed at least 19 people on Saturday continued to deny all liability on Thursday.
At a hearing before House of Representatives Commission V, which oversees public works, officials from state-owned contractor Hutama Karya, which built the bridge in East Kalimantan’s Kutai Kartanegara district, and engineering services firm Bukaka Teknik Utama, which was tasked with its maintenance, absolved themselves of any responsibility.
“It was completely unexpected that this disaster happened,” Bukaka director Ersa Kamaruddin told legislators.
“In this case, we’re like a doctor who receives a patient with some unknown illness and the patient suddenly dies on us.”
He added that the company, owned by former Vice President Jusuf Kalla, had been given a Rp 2.8 billion ($311,000) contract to “change a few bolts and tighten others,” set to run from October to December this year.
However, he said the maintenance work had not yet begun at the time of the collapse and that Bukaka engineers had only gotten as far as carrying out a few measurements.
Ersa said that two Bukaka workers were confirmed dead in the incident and four were still missing and presumed dead.
Hutama Karya, which previously said it was only legally liable for the suspension bridge for the first 180 days of its life, continued to claim ignorance of the flaws that plagued the structure. Hutama Karya director Tri Wijayanto said he was unaware that after construction was completed in 2001, the anchor blocks for the bridge’s pillars kept shifting by 18 centimeters a year.
“As far as we know, it doesn’t matter if it’s shifting. As long as the bridge is still working, then it’s fine,” he said.
“Besides, no one ever complained about the shifting.”
Public Works Minister Djoko Kirmanto, who also testified at the hearing, confirmed an earlier hypothesis by engineers that the suspension cables had not snapped, but that linchpins for the ties connecting the cables to the deck had sheared.
“The cables themselves are still sound. There was no damage to them,” he said.
Tri said the components for the Rp 100 billion bridge were sourced from various suppliers, with the linchpins coming from Bakrie Tosanjaya, a metal-casting firm linked to the family of Golkar Party chairman Aburizal Bakrie.
On Wednesday, Priyo Suprobo, a structural engineer at the Sepuluh Nopember Institute of Technology (ITS) in Surabaya, posited that the collapse began when one of the linchpins along the deck sheared because of uneven loading as a result of a sag in the deck, caused in turn by the shifting anchor blocks.
When the linchpin sheared, he said, it “caused shock loading that resulted in the other linchpins also shearing.”
Priyo said the theory was based on the discovery of a sheared linchpin thrown 50 meters from the bridge
(read in the JG)
(Hutama Karya, which previously said it was only legally liable for the suspension bridge for the first 180 days of its life, continued to claim ignorance of the flaws that plagued the structure. Hutama Karya director Tri Wijayanto said he was unaware that after construction was completed in 2001, the anchor blocks for the bridge’s pillars kept shifting by 18 centimeters a year.
“As far as we know, it doesn’t matter if it’s shifting. As long as the bridge is still working, then it’s fine,” he said. And pak Kesas says "it does not matter if they are shifting, those anchor blocks?... ottenooie can you believe such bull*##*~! I can't!)
vr 2 dec 2011 - 3:06