What are subject matters of road work maintenance in Vietnam?

What are subject matters of road work maintenance in Vietnam? - image from internet

Pursuant to Article 4 of the Circular 37/2018/TT-BGTVT on management, operation and maintenance of road construction works issued by the Minister of Transport (effective from 24/07/2018), the subject matters of road work maintenance in Vietnam are stipulated as follows:

1. Road work inspection

a) Road work inspection shall be conducted by using dedicated equipments or through observation.

b) Road work inspection includes the inspection based on technical standards and regulations; approved maintenance process; regular, periodic and irregular inspections for the purpose of discovering signs of degradation or damage of construction works and equipments installed as the basis for construction work maintenance.

2. Road work monitoring

a) Road work monitoring means supervising, measuring and recording the geometric change, transformation, transposition and other technical specifications of the works and surrounding environment by the time.

b) Road work monitoring that aims at serving the compulsory maintenance must be done in the following cases: road work incidents that cause catastrophe as prescribed in Appendix I issued thereto; construction works or works' components showing signs of subsidence, crack or tilt and other abnormal signs that may lead to collapse and loss of safety during the operation or requirement of the investor, owner or manager or user of construction works.

c) Works’ components to be monitored include main bearing structure of the works which once get damage may lead to the collapse of such construction works (span structure, high abutment and intermediate support; towers; segment);

d) Monitoring matters of construction works prescribed in Appendix I issued thereto are stipulated in the maintenance process including monitoring positions, monitoring specifications and limit value of these specifications (subsidence, tilt, crack, transposition, and sag), monitoring time, measuring cycles and other necessary matters.

dd) The monitoring contractor must conduct a survey, prepare a plan for monitoring and volume and monitoring matters to achieve the purpose and meet requirements of monitoring before construction work monitoring. The monitoring plan must be suitable for monitoring matters which specifies the measurement method, measurement equipments, allocation and structure of monitoring landmark, implementation, method for processing data and other necessary matters.

The monitoring contractor must monitor construction works depending on the approved monitoring plan and send a report on monitoring results to the user or manager of road works, the monitoring data must be compared to limit value regulated by the design and construction contractor or in technical regulations and applicable standards.

For the case in which the monitoring data exceeds the allowable limit value or shows abnormal signs, the manager or user of road works must carry out assessment of bearing and operating safety during the operation and work out solution for timely handling the problem. 3. Road construction work inspection includes the inspection and assessment of quality, damage causes, value, duration of use and other technical specifications of the construction products, road work's components or road construction works through monitoring, experiment in combination with calculation and analysis. Quality assessment that serves maintenance works shall be carried out in the following cases:

a) Periodic assessment depending on the maintenance process approved in accordance with regulations in point a in clause 5 in Article 40 of Decree No.46/2015/ND-CP;

b) Damage of work’s components, the works showing signs of danger or safety hazard for the operation as prescribed in point b in clause 5 in Article 40 of Decree No.46/2015/ND-CP; monitoring results of road works excess the limit value or showing other abnormal signs of bearing safety and operating safety;

c) Request for quality assessment of the work which serves the making of maintenance process of works that is put into operation but not subject to any maintenance process as prescribed in point c in clause 5 in Article 40 of Decree No.46/2015/ND-CP;

d) Demand for base for the extension of operation of construction works out of their design life or the basis for reform and improvement of construction works as prescribed in point d in clause 5 in Article 40 of Decree No.46/2015/ND-CP;

dd) Request for construction by state management authorities as prescribed in point dd in clause 5 in Article 40 of Decree No.46/2015/ND-CP.

4. Road work maintenance must be carried out depending on the annual maintenance plan and approved maintenance process.

5. Road work repair means repairing works’ damage discovered during the operation for the purpose of ensuring the normal operation and safety of such road works. Road work repair includes:

a) periodic repair of road works including periodically repairing damage or replacing work's components, equipments installed to such works that are damaged in consistent with the maintenance process;

b) irregular repair of road works that shall be done when the work or work's components get damaged or suffers unexpected effects from the wind, storm, flood, earthquake, fire or being hit and other effects; or when the works, work's component shows signs of degradation which poses a risk to the safety of work operation. Irregular repair due to storm or flood must be done in accordance with regulations issued by the Ministry of Transport on preventing, fighting against and recovering from effects of storm and floods in road sector.

Above are subject matters of road work maintenance in Vietnam. Please refer to the Circular 37/2018/TT-BGTVT for more details.

Best regards!