She said that the contract documents had specifically addressed the need to avoid this happening. "Clearly what we saw yesterday did not meet those requirements," she said.

She said that it is to be expected that there can be accumulations of snow on bridges in the province, but that it would normally only fall on a very infrequent basis. An amount of that would be acceptable but “this was absolutely out of what we would expect to see in a typical winter circumstance on that bridge and is completely unacceptable and so we're looking at this in a very different way”.

The cable-stayed bridge has been built by Kiewit-Flatiron under a design and build contract and opened to traffic this month.