ABSTRACT
Indonesia is the largest archipelagic country in the world. It has unique geography with various types of river flows where bridges are widely developed as road connecting structure. With these conditions, Indonesia has a great risk of bridge failure due to river flow. In the last years, there has been several bridge incidents occurred due to scouring and flood. For instance, because of heavy river flow, 3 (three) bridges located in the province of North Sulawesi collapsed in 2020. Yet, condition inspections and rehabilitations were not carried out properly at that time. Therefore, in conjunction with this condition, guidelines for scour inspection and identification on rivers were recently carried out as a supplement to the 2011 bridge inspection guidelines. As scour in bridge substructure becomes the main indication for bridge failure, it needs to be anticipated as early as possible through inspection, defect analysis and responsive decision making for practical implementation. These have been pursued for Indonesia’s national bridging, where almost 20% of it is in scour-prone zone (based on the assumption that riverbed soils are soils that are easily eroded). This paper describes efforts to improve scour management on bridges consisting of risk identification and inspection results, field monitoring to measure the competence of bridge managers, and improvement of inspection guideline instructions in watersheds that have been carried out for the last 4 years. Although it has not directly improved the effectiveness of the use of guidelines, intensive dissemination, and training to bridge inspector, the use of guidelines has been carried out. It is expected that these guidelines in conjunction with various intensive efforts will help to prevent and reduce the risk of bridge structural failure caused by scour in Indonesia.
