Briefing note from the county council

There are approximately 2500 highway structures on the local road network in Hertfordshire of which 1700 are owned by HCC. The remainder are owned by third parties such as Network Rail, British Waterways or District Councils. Highways Structures typically include for Bridges, Culverts, Retaining Wall, Gantries and Tunnels.

Hertfordshire Highways has a dedicated structures team to look after County bridges stock but not responsible for the condition survey of the private bridges.
For the County bridges, every structure is visually inspected on a biennial cycle. The inspection results are recorded to nationally agreed standards where a bridge condition indicator (score) is determined. The current bridge condition indicator for Hertfordshire bridges stock is 87/100, which is ranked as good.

In Hertfordshire, we do not have such major rivers (or coasts) to exacerbate the flood risks and our bridges are less exposed to flooding dangers as compared to other parts of the Country. However, we are not complacent on the above safety issue and have opted for a further under water type inspection to complement our above water level visual inspections. We typically keep a list of those structures with a potential scour problem (due to nature of the watercourse they cross) and we carry out a detailed under water inspection to guard against scour to such bridge foundations.

This year’s cycle of diving inspection is programmed to be complete by April 2010.