The Enugu government has appealed to President Bola Tinubu to expedite the rehabilitation of the New Artisan Bridge on the Enugu-Port Harcourt Expressway, which collapsed a year ago.

It also urged the Federal Ministry of Works to conduct integrity tests on all bridges built on federal highways within the state to avoid another incident.

The Enugu commissioner for works and infrastructure, Gerald Otiji, made the plea on Tuesday.

Mr Otiji said the fast deterioration of internal roads within the Enugu metropolis was due to the collapsed bridge and overloaded 90-tonne trucks plying them daily to reach various parts of the country.

He said the situation had been a pain in the neck of the state government and had caused “great financial bleeding as well.”

According to him, the drivers of these over-loaded 90-tonne trucks, previously advised to take a particular route within the metropolis to reconnect their journeys, have found multiple routes within the metropolis and caused deterioration of most internal roads.

The commissioner noted that most internal roads, trunk B and trunk C roads, were not constructed to carry hundreds of heavy-ton vehicles and machinery daily.

“We have set up a committee that oversees the repair works done on these internal Enugu metropolis roads, especially from 12:00 a.m. and 4:00 a.m. This is in order not to cause traffic jams during normal day-time hours and create serious hold-ups that will affect business and human activities.

“But these weekly and continuous repairs on each of the internal roads have cost the state huge resources. We have spent about one-tenth of what we will use to build total roads in Enugu State on weekly repairs of the roads for close to a year now,” he said.

On road projects in the state, Otiji said that the state government had completed 51 roads of the 81 flagged off for construction and reconstruction of 81 roads last year.

The commissioner, however, said that it would have completed all the roads but for the bridge that collapsed last year that changed the trajectory.

“Meanwhile, a lot of road projects are going on in the rural areas with about 25 rural roads in progress while we have another scooped 15 roads,” he said. “Initially when we started, we had issues with some contractors not abiding by direct contractual specifications. But the ministry and state government insisted on it to guarantee quality and value for money; today all are complying knowing that the government will not condone any deviation or short in quality-cum-quantity of any job.”

(NAN)