The Federal Government yesterday revealed plans to deploy robotic machines for underwater inspection of bridges nationwide.

The Minister of Works Dave Umahi at a stakeholders engagement on Section 2 of the Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway project said the move was to reduce the cost of hiring divers for underwater assessments.

He said: “We are going to locate a robotic kind of machine that will be able to do the diving to allow us to see everything happening under the water in all our bridges.”

According to him, hiring divers to go under the water to check what is happening inside is causing a lot of money.

He said the Managing Director of HITECH Construction Company, Danny Abboud, would help to ‘locate that mission and then we would like to buy it’.

Umahi also declared a “bridge emergency” to assess the condition of bridges, particularly those constructed 53 years ago, across the country.

“We want to declare, I don’t know the word to use, bridge emergency, on our bridges, to know what is happening 53 years after we constructed these bridges, not only in Lagos but nationwide,” he said.

He announced that President Bola Tinubu would inaugurate several projects starting from May 1.

The minister added that more projects would be inaugurated by December. “I want Nigerians to have hope in the renewed hope administration as we are building for the future and inherited projects are given adequate attention,” he said.”