Bridge collapses may become more frequent in Ukraine - Victor Medved on Holos.ua

The collapse of the bridge over the Chortomlyk River in the Nikopol district of Dnipropetrovs'k region showed that Ukraine's infrastructure is not properly funded.

Viktor Medvid, director of the William Invest Expert consulting company, told this in a commentary to GolosUA.

"The issue is that infrastructure is financed on a residual basis. Construction is a secondary factor, but infrastructure maintenance is funded on a residual basis. Bridges are included in the balance sheet of many roads almost everywhere. If we need about UAH 2 trillion to build roads from scratch and about UAH 100 billion a year for normal road maintenance, and we allocate about UAH 50-60 billion for construction and repair, it means that we at least have a road maintenance issue. It would be normal to have 100 billion for this. This is, roughly speaking, 5 % of the book value of the roads. 100 billion would be enough to maintain all this. Accordingly, the work today is based on the accident rate. Where there is a high degree of accidents, money is directed to repair them. We can see this on Kyiv bridges. When they see that the situation is critical, they begin to take some action when something starts to physically collapse, as, for example, with the Shuliavskyi Bridge," said Viktor Medvid.

Today, specialized services are unable to monitor and prevent accidents on bridges like the one in Dnipropetrovs'k region.

"It's impossible to watch. The logic of officials is that there is a safety margin, including operational safety. They check for strength by observation. They do it not in accordance with state building codes, but by physical observation. That's why we're getting to the point where bridges are collapsing, and houses are collapsing, as they did recently in Odesa. But the main problem is that there is no priority for infrastructure funding. Therefore, the executive branch is forced to work from accident to accident. The trend is not changing," Viktor Medved emphasized.

The expert believes that Zelensky's program of large-scale construction is a great folly.

"The large-scale construction program that the president confirmed yesterday is nonsense. If there is no money to maintain the current infrastructure, money should be spent on overhauling the existing infrastructure, not building a new one, which also needs money to maintain it. The program is stupid in the sense that we are not able to maintain what we have, but we are building new things. As a result, we will come to the point where the existing facilities will be destroyed along with the new ones. This is nonsense. On the one hand, it is a political imitation. Most of these bridges were built in the same period. Therefore, we may end up in a period when they will collapse at a frequency of not one bridge per six months, but one bridge per week," Viktor Medved emphasized.