A Maryland construction manager was fined more than $131,000 and sentenced to a year of home detention in connection to a case of providing subpar concrete for the building of Woodrow Wilson Bridge and another massive federally funded project. Santos Eliazar Rivas was sentenced last week to 12 months of home detention and 24 months of probation in Baltimore’s U.S. District Court, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation Inspector General’s Office. As an undocumented immigrant, he is expected to be deported at the end of his sentence.
The sentence was far less than he could have gotten, though. Rivas pleaded guilty in September to three counts of making false statements about the highway project materials. Under the plea deal, he could have served as much five years behind bars and paid up to $250,000, court documents show.
“Under the circumstances, we are grateful that the judge made the decision he did,” his attorney David Irwin said in a statement Tuesday. “It was real justice in a difficult situation.”
Rivas had been the director of quality control for Pennsylvania-based Frederick Precast Concrete, Inc., which produced precast concrete drainage structures for building projects such as the Wilson Bridge project and Interstate 70 near Baltimore.
But the materials failed to conform to state-approved specifications, according to a federal investigation. Some structures contained the wrong amounts and types of steel rebar, while others had unapproved wire mesh as the foundation for the concrete instead of stronger steel rebar.
“All of them were materially weaker than if they had been produced according to design,” according to the Inspector General’s Office.
On numerous occasions, Rivas had signed off on shipping tickets containing concrete that hadn’t been tested – or had failed to meet strength standards.
The problems were found in 2007 when a precast structure on Interstate 70 cracked open, according to court records. It had only two layers of rebar instead of the required three.
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Maryland highway officials then checked all projects to find other pieces provided by the company. All of their materials have been replaced at the company’s expense, said Maryland State Highway Administration spokesman David Buck.
“It never in any shape or form affected the integrity of the bridge,” he said.
