President of the Ghana Institution of Engineering, Ing. Kwabena Bempong is advocating for the need for the state to clamp down on the menace of overloaded heavy axle trucks plying the country’s roads.
Many of the country’s major roads easily deteriorate after construction decreasing the expected life spans of such roads. The prevalent phenomenon brings about transportation difficulties, poses health hazards, and also costs the states huge sums of money to repair and renovate the deteriorating roads.
This fast-paced destruction of newly constructed roads and the general short life span of the country’s road networks, Ing. Kwabena Bempong has identified overloaded trucks plying the country’s roads as the main culprit.
The highway and structural engineer tells The High Street Journal that data he has collected and analyzed reveals that these prevalent overloaded trucks exert extra pressure more than what the roads have been designed to accommodate.
“Every road is designed to carry a particular load, in our field we call it the cumulative standard axle. This is dependent on the track load on the pavement. The pavement will be designed for a particular loading. Every truck is supposed to carry a certain weight, depending on the number of axles,” Ing. Bempong explained.
He added that, “however, in Ghana, it’s not somebody telling me, it is something that I have observed and worked on in terms of collection of data. You have a lot of these trucks being overloaded. When the trucks are overloaded, definitely that is going to shorten the life span of the roads.”
Aside from these overloaded trucks, the President of GhIE admitted that some materials used by some contractors to build the country’s roads are of inferior quality coupled with substandard design and in addition lack of proper supervision.
“Are we procuring the right to people to design and to construct and obviously supervise? If we do not have the right people to undertake these three-legged parts of the road construction, then we are going to fail,” he stated adding that “if you don’t select the right materials for the job or the materials are not fit for purpose, then obviously that road is not going to stand the test of time.”
To him, some contractors and engineers are just business people with the sole aim of minimizing cost and maximizing their profit hence undertaking shoddy works costing the nation millions of cedis.
The Ghana Highway Authority has an Axle Load Control Unit with checkpoints on the major road networks across the country. This unit is to control the overloading and dimensions of heavy trucks on the road network through the installation of axle weighing equipment. This observation by Ing. Kwabena Bempong on the prevalent overloaded heavy trucks questions the operations and efficiency of the Axle Load Control Unit. There is therefore the need for their operations to be improved to protect and prolong the life span and quality of the country’s road networks.
