Roadworks testing is carried out to ensure that the contractor delivers and specified standards to ensure that the road in question will serve its purpose for the stipulated design life. How a road performs is not solely dependent on testing requirements but also on proper specification and design. While not wishing to undervalue the importance of testing, ensuring that roadworks are in line with set specifications is also achieved by proper supervision and by imposing contractual conditions such as guarantees and a defects liability period.
Most aspects of road design and construction have been comprehensively addressed by the Malta Transport Authority (ADT) in the past 10 years. Very soon after its founding, the ADT issued specifications for the construction of various types of road. These specifications, included in legal notice 364/2003, are binding on all entities carrying out roadworks, including local councils. If the principles of subsidiarity and decentralisation of power are properly assumed, it is local councils' responsibility to impose quality assurance measures in their road construction projects. Similar standards bind utility corporations to ensure good quality works in trenching and other infrastructural projects.
The current discussion about independent testing puts into question the good work carried out on arterial and residential roads in recent years. Most of the designs of arterial roads have been externally audited. The roads financed by the fifth Italo-Maltese financial protocol were audited by ANAS while the designs for EU-funded roads to be financed in the coming years have been audited by Ove Arup Consultants.
The issue of independent laboratory testing has been a concern for the ADT for as long as I have known it. No laboratory in Malta has the appropriate accreditation. The legal notice refers to the various responsibilities involved in testing roadworks. The contractor is responsible for quality assurance. The ADT is responsible for performance and control testing. In fact, ADT personnel carry out regular tests for subsoil strength and compaction, surface irregularities and skid resistance, among others.
In parallel, the ADT has been taking the added precaution of carrying out integrity checks on the various contractor-associated facilities; by privately and quietly carrying out tests on samples that had already been certified by contractors' labs. On other occasions, as part of its control testing, the ADT randomly collected samples, numbered them and submitted them to labs where no connection to the contractor could be traced. This shows that checks and balances have long been inherent in the system.
In all arterial roads projects of recent years, testing was definitely not an academic exercise. It was part of the audit trail, inherently linked to certification and payment. It also affected the course of works. For example, there have been instances, such as the Zebbug Road near Autobahn, where the surface was re-laid following control testing results by the ADT. On the Manwel Dimech Bridge, in order to ensure that the concrete reached the specified strengths, trial casts were poured, cores taken and sent to the German Cement Institute for testing. Also, the mix design for the specialised tarmac, called gussasphalt, was prepared in Germany, a trial mix was then carried out in Malta and subsequently on site testing was performed in the presence of ADT personnel and a supervisor.
While the testing requirements for the Italian protocol roads or the first EU-funded roads served their purposes adequately, the need to be ever-more vigilant and close potential loopholes was addressed some months ago in the drafting of new tenders. A cursory look at the tender for the construction management services for the reconstruction of the Marsascala bypass published some months ago shows that further improvement to the check and balance system was being proposed, whereby the supervisor entrusted with the works would also be responsible for control testing of all materials used in road construction.
To date ADT has been focused on performance testing - that is testing of the end result - primarily because this is what ultimately matters. One must also keep in mind that a failure in performance testing normally indicates either a failure in materials or a failure in workmanship.
A lab that has the capacity to handle the complete QA programme (materials, confirmation and performance testing) for every project that may be running on a given day needs to invest heavily in human resources and adopt a round the clock service attitude.
A quality assurance culture is not adopted overnight. Now that it has become the norm to carry out quality assurance testing, it is probably time to take it to the next level and increase the frequency of the contractors' own testing and expand ADT's confirmation testing regime. Moreover, in order to sustain this culture, proper budgeting and overall capacity building are required.
Mr Mugliett is former Transport Minister.