New Inspection and Risk Assessment Methods for Metal Highway Culverts in Ohio

Abstract

This paper first describes Ohio's new statewide culvert management program, which aimed to reduce the risk of structural failure of culverts that serve major highways. The paper next describes a research project conducted by the Ohio Research Institute for Transportation and the Environment (ORITE) research team at Ohio University to validate the effectiveness of the approaches outlined in the new program. The new culvert program is supported by high-resolution field inspection and rating procedures for concrete, metal, and thermo-plastic culverts. This paper focuses on the metal culvert components of the research project. The new field inspection procedure for metal culverts was applied at 25 sites to detect problems common to many metal culvert sites in Ohio. The data produced during the field inspection phase were analyzed statistically to evaluate the effectiveness of the new procedure and to verify the findings made by the previous study about the conditions of the metal culverts that serve Ohio's major highways. Finally, the paper presents a risk assessment method proposed by the ORITE researchers for computing and adjusting the structural rating of the metal culvert and recommends a course of action.