The Federal Highway Administration says at least 64 structures that support the ramps and bridges in the Route 195 reconstruction project, show in October 2007, contain concrete that wasn’t tested for strength.

Journal FIle / Andrew Dickerman

PROVIDENCE — The Department of Transportation failed to test the strength of concrete used in structural elements that hold up much of its flagship project, the new section of Route 195 being built through the city, according to just-released federal documents.

In all, Federal Highway Administration documents said, at least 64 structures that support the ramps and bridges in the $610-million project contain concrete that wasn’t tested for strength, in violation of various standards.

The structures in question extend across the sprawling construction site, including the ramps that will form Route 195’s new interchange with Route 95 and connect it to the new Providence River Bridge and the supports of the new arch bridge itself.

In an Aug. 15, 2007, letter to DOT Director Jerome F. Williams, the federal agency said that DOT’s concrete sampling and testing “was found generally to be non-compliant” with the DOT’s own regulations.

There were these other developments:

•Williams confirmed that he has reassigned two top DOT engineers pending an internal investigation on concrete testing. They are James R. Caroselli, a $92,792-a-year chief civil engineer in charge of the 195 project, and Mark E. Felag, the $106,019-a-year managing engineer in charge of the DOT’s materials section, responsible for testing materials including concrete.

Caroselli has been shifted to the DOT maintenance division and Felag to its research section, Williams said. He said the reassignments are temporary and are not intended as punishment.

•The FHWA has made public a second notice to the DOT that it would not be reimbursed for Route 195 costs, this time for $679,399 of the cost of metalizing steel for the new Providence River Bridge, or coating it with zinc to protect it from rust. The federal agency said the zinc coating wasn’t thick enough to meet minimum standards and is therefore ineligible for federal reimbursement.

Last Thursday, The Journal reported that the FHWA has demanded that the state repay $3.1 million because of the DOT’s failure to adequately test concrete for the 195 project. If that and the metalizing findings hold, the state would have to pay both amounts out of its own strained budget rather than from federal aid.

Both state and federal officials have said that the testing lapses don’t mean that the structures involved are unsafe.

The newly released documents include correspondence between FHWA and the DOT last summer and fall that adds considerable detail to the testing problems federal investigators found. They recount how many structural elements of the project’s bridges and ramps were involved — 64, according to an August FHWA document, and 74 according to a report on a December 2007 meeting of state and federal officials and an engineer from the Maguire Group, the DOT’s engineering consultants.

The documents also specifically include structural elements, including piers, of the new Providence River Bridge, among those containing concrete that the DOT failed to test.

The FHWA documents also reported these problems:

•Concrete used in several places had too little air in it. That’s important because tiny air cells improve concrete’s resistance to freezing when it’s exposed to water and deicing chemicals, according to the Portland Cement Association, an industry group.

•Some concrete wasn’t delivered in the required 90 minutes. If concrete starts to set before it’s poured, it loses strength.

•The FHWA investigation focused on concrete that the DOT didn’t test at all. But the agency also found that the DOT often crossed out the lowest of four concrete strength test results and averaged the rest, rather than averaging them all as the DOT’s own specifications require. Last October, The Journal reported instances of the same practice on concrete tests from the DOT’s Route 403 project.

•Where the DOT is supposed to take random samples from multi-truckload batches, in more than half of the cases checked the samples were all taken from the first truck.

Yesterday, Williams and other DOT officials disagreed with some of the federal findings, and said that they dealt with the problems last year, mostly through additional testing to confirm that untested concrete was sound and through changes to bring the DOT’s testing procedures into compliance with its own regulations.

As he has since last year when questions came up about the DOT’s testing program, Williams acknowledged yesterday that it wasn’t adequate and said he immediately made changes to reflect the DOT’s own standards.

“I am very upset that we didn’t do the testing in 2005, 2006 and 2007,” said Williams. “We should have been testing all the concrete.”

Williams left the state Department of Administration to take over the DOT in December 2006 and will return to the Administration department Monday.

The disagreements largely concern how problems are tallied and what to count. For example, where the FHWA said 64 “structures” were involved, Kazem Farhoumand, the DOT’s acting chief engineer, said the number is actually smaller because, in his view, what the FHWA considered structures — a pier footing, or foundation, and the cylindrical pier itself — are actually just parts of a single structure.

Where federal officials produced long lists of structures containing concrete that wasn’t tested, Farhoumand said that less than 3 percent of the concrete in the project wasn’t tested.

The findings focus on four contracts central to the 195 project, all of them held by Cardi Corp, the Warwick-based construction company. Cardi also supplies its own concrete.

However, documents released so far indicate that the federal investigation was aimed, not at Cardi, but at the DOT’s failure to follow the testing procedures that are intended to make sure that concrete meets contract standards and that federal taxpayers got their money’s worth.

kgregg@projo.com