Vehicles damaged by debris on Glenmore Trail; incident shuts down Deerfoot ramp
原始发布日期： 2016-02-25 发布者：李方字变大 字变小
|
Rick Malyszka's car was one of numerous vehicles suffering damage when a rogue expansion joint tangled the morning commute on Glenmore Trail. Crumbling concrete on an old bridge is being blamed for blowing tires and causing rim damage to more than a dozen vehicles Wednesday morning, after a section of metal expansion joint popped up from the road surface. The jutting metal tore open the tires of vehicles passing over the eastbound bridge on Glenmore Trail near the Deerfoot off-ramp in the pre-dawn, causing roughly 15 drivers to pull over with ruined rubber, and tangling traffic as the morning rush hour started. “I heard two very loud bangs, but I didn’t see what I hit at first,” said motorist Rick Malyszka. “Mine was the third car to hit it and that was at about 20 to six in the morning — it was still dark, and I didn’t see anything in the road.” Malyszka says he later spotted a thick length of iron on the road, more than a metre long, that had been torn up by the passing cars. The total damage to Malyszka’s 2005 Pontiac Grand-Am remains in the dark too, with his mechanic estimating at least $1,100 for new tires and rims, and up to another $2,000 for damages that could include suspension, alignment and some bodywork. Malyszka has already been in contact with the city about reimbursement, and he says he wants and expects all the damage to be covered. “I just want my car back the way it was,” he said. It may be a difficult point for the city to argue, after officials admitted the bridge was in bad shape, and was actually due to be replaced in the near future — though they say it was being regularly monitored for general condition. “The concrete adjacent to those expansion joints just deteriorates with time,” said Craig MacFarlane, senior bridge engineer with the City of Calgary. MacFarlane says the bridge, which passes over a decommissioned railway line, is due to be removed within the next two years and the trail line beneath the road filled in, thus making the bridge redundant and the need for expansion joints will be in the past. Trying to save money ahead of that project explains the rough condition of the 40-year-old bridge, says the senior engineer. “The bridge serves no purpose anymore, and rather than spend good money on major repairs, we were just nursing it along until it could be replaced,” said MacFarlane. “We were inspecting it quite frequently, but despite the best efforts, you can’t always predict when something will go wrong.” On Wednesday, city crews were out patching the gap left by the expansion joint failure, and MacFarlane says they will return over the next couple of weeks to do a through examination of the entire structure. “We’ll go back in to do a more thorough investigation,” he said. — Postmedia (摘自Calgary Herald) |