Posted on 04/17/2015 5:11:27 AM PDT by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
Raleigh, N.C. — A highway contractor pleaded guilty Thursday in a scheme to supply defective components to bridges in North Carolina, authorities said.
Joel De La Torre, 33, of Chicago, pleaded guilty to federal charges of making false statements concerning highway projects and aggravated identity theft. He will be sentenced in July, when he faces up to seven years in prison and $500,000 in fines.
Defects were found in October 2011 in elastomeric bridge bearings – slabs of rubber reinforced with multiple layers of steel and placed underneath bridges to absorb shock – that had been shipped to 25 highway projects throughout North Carolina and installed on 19 of them. The steel plates in 1,270 bearings were exposed, creating the potential for the material to corrode and weaken, authorities said.
The North Carolina Department of Transportation found that many of the bridge bearings had come from Delgado Elastomeric Bearings Corp., and the U.S. Department of Transportation determined that a teenager's name was forged on the North Carolina application to supply the bridge bearings to local contractors. The application listed the teen as Delgado's vice president, and his name also had been used on all certificates sent to North Carolina highway contractors certifying that the bearings met applicable state and federal regulations.
(Excerpt) Read more at wral.com ...
Just the man for Rahm Emanuel. I bet The One will give this fellow a pardon in January 2017.
Just wondering where these defective parts came from. Could it be from the same country where Wal Mart gets most of it’s products?
Inferior materials supply must be one of the world’s oldest scams.
The cables of the Brooklyn bridge are made up mostly of wire that didn’t meet the standards called for. The supplier supplied enough of the extra high quality wire for testing but used his standard product for the rest. Fortunately the standards we so high that even the “inferior” product was still of high quality.
where was the inferior product actually manufactured?? this Tarheel wants to know!
Who does stuff like this? You put thousands, maybe millions of people at risk so you can make a little money? How about getting a job?
A mobbed-up Unionista skimming money off of a construction contract? Unheard of! *SMIRK*
Meh. He’ll be out when he’s 40 and his union job will be waiting for him...
#4 The pyramids are an example.
They were all square structures to begin with but over the years the rocks fell off and today we see pyramid shapes....
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.