Never-ending story of Bucharest-Pitesti highway

The Bucharest-Pitesti highway is beginning to look like a monastery built by Master Manole (in which case everything built during daytime would collapse during the night), an endless work, where only the master changes. The last company called for this position was the Italian Federici-Astaldi-Todini (FAT) Group. Only that the retooling, advertised as a huge victory of the former Transports minister now looks like a patch job to the drivers going this way.
The first signs showed last year, when cavities formed and a section of the road between the 23rd and the 46th km deteriorated. Cavities took over other parts of the highway right after the last snowfall this year. The highway was finished with a one-year warranty and this is exactly how much it lasted. To fix the first quarter of this highway, which will cost some 10-18 million euros, the National Road Administration will organise a tender set to probably take place this spring.
What has actually happened?
“The modernisation works on the highway, begun in 1997 and checked and signed for in August 2000, were performed by the Italian group as contractor, Hidroconstructia and Energoconstructia as subcontractors, with Albix Timisoara and Cosar Bucharest as subcontractors for coating the above-mentioned 23-km section with slurry-seal,” National Road Administration sources told Ziarul Financiar. “The slurry-seal coat, which is a bituminous coating about 2 cm thick, was a solution imposed by the budget of the project. The slurry-seal, however, is not a constructive solution, but rather a maintenance one, though,” the quoted sources said.
The budget of the project amounted to $85 million for the rehabilitation of the 96 km, with $53 million having been provided by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and the rest covered by the Romanian Government. Any other constructive solutions, such as concrete or asphaltic mixture would have raised the costs by another $17-$20 million, the experts say.