Windsor’s PSI wins big on parkway girder job

Loris Collavino’s Prestressed Systems Inc. (PSI) is one of the local Windsor, Ont. businesses that has done well from the massive $1.4-billion Herb Gray Parkway project connecting Hwy. 401 to a planned bridge to Detroit.

Collavino’s firm had been selected back in 2012, along with a European company, Freyssinet, to build girders for the 11 tunnels that make up the 11 km six-lane mostly-submerged expressway, which is Ontario’s biggest road project.

But in wake of a scandal over the quality of many of the girders produced by the European firm — which was fired by the Ontario Ministry of Transportation (MTO) from the project — homegrown and family-run PSI has gained significantly more work.

PSI’s Walker Road yards are manufacturing five NU (Nebraska University) girders a day for the highway on a contract for as many as 600 girders, the last to be cured and stressed by August, at a total value of about $20 million. It generally matches the firm’s original 2012 contract.

A provincially-appointed independent expert panel found major defects in hundreds of the Freyssinet girders already laid along the project, and the private consortium overseeing the construction, Windsor Essex Mobility group (WEMG), is now in the final days of removing and destroying them, at its own expense.

“Removal of the girders in question has been completed in all locations except at Tunnel 2 (Labelle Street Tunnel) where work will proceed for a few more weeks,” said MTO project spokeswoman Heather Grondin.

NU Girders are widely used in the U.S. but this is their first production in Ontario, a choice made by MTO because of their high load-bearing capacity. The Freyssinet girders were also of NU design.

Collavino said NU girders are identifiable from their sides.

“Their cross sectional profiles are a little different than the ones that we typically use which are CPCI girders here in Ontario,” he said. “The bottom of the beam is a little wider, a little chunkier and the top is also.”

This allows for fewer beams to be laid for a bridge, reducing the number of girders by one.

“Early on, the consortium decided they wanted to go with these NU cross sections and girders because there were some savings,” he said.

Collavino got the contract in November and spent two months expanding his facilities and hiring as many as 20 new staff, for a total 80 dedicated to the Parkway.

“We took two of our beds and we extended those to almost twice the length, and then there was one bed that we converted over from a different product,” he said.

They previously had been producing two girders a day. The firm was also caught up in the girder investigation but no problems were found with its work.

This expansion now positions PSI as one of the largest bridge girder manufacturers in the province and Collavino sees many opportunities.

“We’re already looking at the next phase of the (Hwy.) 407, we are absolutely going to be looking at doing a lot more work for the Ministry of Transportation now that we have this capacity,” he said.

The firm used to be part of the Collavino Group, whose work includes being prime subcontractor for cast-in-place on Manhattan’s Freedom Tower. But, in 1990 one side of the family went into construction and the other into precast.

Collavino said a lot has changed since the expert panel found a serious lack of supervision in girder production yards.

“I have to say there’s more oversight now only because no one wants to see this problem again,” he said.

But Collavino said his firm always had its own quality verification engineer on site.

“We’ve noticed there’s more oversight but for us really nothing has changed because we had all of the systems in place,” he said.

Meanwhile the defective girders have become a political football after Ontario NDP released files this spring obtained under the Freedom of Information Act which, the party says, showed the Liberal government did not act early enough last year to halt the girders’ production.

NDP infrastructure critic and MPP for Windsor-Tecumseh Percy Hatfield said the documents show “industry sources” contacted the government in late 2012 indicating the girders were not made to CSA standards “without CSA welders, and without an engineer on site.”

And there was intra-government conflict. In February 2013, one email between the MTO’s lead Parkway engineer Fausto Natarelli to Infrastructure Ontario’s senior vice president of civil infrastructure Derek Toigo, stated: “I have no confidence in you — or frankly your organization to act in the provincial interest.”

Two ministers – first Bob Chiarelli and later Glen Murray – handled the transportation portfolio, with Murray finally ordering a halt to girder construction on June 19 last year and announcing the expert panel in July.

“If somebody in your government knows in November and no action is taken until July there’s a problem,” Hatfield said.

But the NDP was quickly admonished by Windsor mayor Eddie Francis, who said unless the party has new information, “the continual perpetuation of a resolved matter casts a permanent cloud over our community and the infrastructure.”