After his suspension ends, Scott Gullacher won’t be able to work on bridge projects for 5 years
Scott Gullacher has been banned from being a professional engineer in Saskatchewan for 18 months because he designed a bridge that fell apart just hours after it opened to the public.
Gullacher built the Dyck Memorial Bridge in the Rural Municipality of Clayton, which is about 300 km east of Saskatoon. On September 14, 2018, it opened and then fell down.
When it fell into the river, no one was hurt.
Early this year, a discipline committee for the Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of Saskatchewan (APEGS) found the engineer guilty of three counts of professional misconduct.
On Monday, the association released its final order about Gullacher’s wrongdoing, which included the collapse of the bridge, which the document called a “catastrophic failure,” and other projects.
The association decided that Gullacher didn’t work on the Dyck Memorial Bridge in a “careful and diligent” way because he didn’t use a site-specific geotechnical analysis and didn’t provide good engineering designs for the helical pile foundations.
The engineer was also told he did a bad job on five other bridges in the Saskatchewan towns of Scott, Caledonia, Mervin, and Perdue.
In this case, the panel of the discipline committee found that Gullacher’s designs “lacked relevant design information, including inaccurate representations of bridge designs,” among other code violations.
This led to “five designs for the superstructure that were not strong enough to hold the minimum loads required by the code.”
Engineer will get back to work later this year
APEGS’s final order says that Gullacher is living and working outside of the province at the moment. But it says that he has said he wants to go back to Saskatchewan and work as an engineer again.This could happen as soon as December 2023.
Gullacher’s suspension goes all the way back to June 8, 2022, which is when he was told to stop working as a professional in the province.
But there will be limits if he comes back.
Once the engineer’s suspension period is over, he won’t be able to work on bridge projects in Saskatchewan for five years.
Gullacher will also be under direct watch for three years.During that time, Gullacher must complete five hours of ethics training that can be checked every year.
He must also pay the maximum fine of $15,000 from APEGS, on top of the $32,000 the association spent on its investigation.
The engineer has already had to pay some money because of what he did.
According to the association, Gullacher said during the investigation that he paid $250,000 out of his own pocket to fix the collapsed Dyck Memorial Bridge. He has also apologized to all of the rural towns that were hurt by what he did.
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The APEGS order also showed that Gullacher lost his business, Inertia Solutions Inc., after he was told to stop working in the province.