Inspection and Risk Assessment of Concrete Culverts under Ohio’s Highways

In 2003 the Ohio Department of Transportation (ODOT) implemented a new culvert management program. Simultaneously, a team of researchers from the Ohio Research Institute for Transportation and the Environment (ORITE) and engineers from a private consulting firm conducted a joint study to evaluate the effectiveness of field culvert inspection and rating procedures proposed by the ODOT’s new program and describe the best remedial measures currently available for highway culverts. This paper focuses on the first component and addresses it relative to concrete culverts. The new inspection procedure for concrete culverts was applied at 25 sites. Inspection data were examined to detect common problems existing at concrete culvert sites in Ohio. The field data were also analyzed using statistical software to identify factors that contribute to the degradation of concrete culverts. Despite the limited amount of data, the results indicated that the ODOT approach was basically sound. The final segment of the paper presents a risk assessment method developed by the ORITE researchers. The proposed risk assessment method computes the overall structural health rating for any inspected culvert and recommends a course of action.