Highway embankment to be rebuilt in southern Serbia

N1

An embankment on the Nis-Dimitrovgrad highway had to be rebuilt because of bad foundations with sources at the Corridors Serbia roads company saying that the structure of the ground had changed which experts said is impossible.

The cost of the reconstruction of the 160 meters of highway section between the city of Nis and Prosek will be paid by Corridors Serbia.  

Construction and Infrastructure Minister Zorana Mihajlovic said that mistakes were made in preparing for the construction.  

Corridors Serbia construction department chief Aleksandar Senic told N1 that the ground was tested in 2008 before the embankment was built, adding that there were no indications that the two meters of topsoil would turn to mud. “Fresh testing last spring showed that floods and high levels of underground waters in 2014 caused a lower level of cohesion in the ground,” he said.  

N1 requested but was not granted insight into the geo-mechanical test results from 2008.   Engineer Danijel Dasic said those claims are impossible. “The last changes of that kind happened during the age of the dinosaurs,” he said adding that it would take a major natural disaster to cause something like what Senic claims happened. “The latest of those was in 1948 in Nis,” he said.