Fifth Bridge Fails on Route 1856

The fifth bridge has fallen in the new border board paralleling the southern bank of the San Juan River. It was made of wooden tree trunks laid across cargo containers.

The makeshift bridge shows either that a) the road is far from finished when an investigation of possible contract fraud halted payments to construction companies or b) the contractors were trying to get away with something.

Fortunately, not all bridges here are made in the same slipshod way, although the fourth border road bridge to fall, a couple of days before, was also propped up by cargo containers.

If nothing else, the improvised bridge construction shows the unholy haste in which the border road was built at an announced $30 million cost. It may take at least that much to remedy construction errors.

Payment to contractors was halted earlier this year amid charges of bribery of CONAVI highway officals. (See previous articles.) An official investigation into possible bribery is underway.

Meanwhile, other charges range from a lack of plan or environmental impact study to unnecessary deforestation and illegal logging. But the strangest manifestation of a strange story is the tossing of a couple of cargo containers into a dry wash and covering it with earth topped by logs to make a bridge.

Unfortunately, there are no dry washes in Costa Rica during the rainy season.

Editor's note: This article was written late Thursday. It is possibile that more disasters have happeded to the road (trocha in Spanish) by the time it reaches these pages. Defects in Route 1856 form faster than we can write.

By Rod Hughes, Fijatevos.com