PANGANDARAN, Sept 17 — Indonesia’s army will review nearly 3,400 bridges it and the police have built nationwide after a suspension bridge collapsed in West Java on the day it was due to be inaugurated.

Army chief-of-staff General Maruli Simanjuntak said the review was ordered after the Pongpet suspension bridge in Margacinta village gave way on August 30, with around 50 people on it at the time.

No one was killed, although several villagers suffered minor injuries and abrasions, according to the army.

“I apologise, but there are indeed technical matters where we may have been negligent, in supervising the rules for bridge use or perhaps the quality of bridges we have built,” Maruli told CNA in an exclusive interview published today.

The 60-metre bridge, which spans a river about three metres below, is expected to cost 400 million rupiah (RM103,000) to rebuild.

Maruli said the army would review the bridges to identify any problems and improve their safety.

“So that, hopefully, things will be better going forward,” he said.

The Pongpet bridge was among 2,700 so-called Garuda bridges completed by the army in less than a year, including about 800 serving disaster-hit areas.

Suspension bridges account for about 30 per cent of the total, while busier routes use concrete bridges and prefabricated designs are used elsewhere to reduce costs.

Maruli said the army’s engineering corps had long been involved in bridge construction as part of its wartime duties.

“One of its duties is to build bridges under wartime conditions. If they can do that in war, then in peacetime the work should certainly be better. We can also bring in experts to help; that is not a problem,” he said.

The army’s bridge-building programme is part of a wider push by President Prabowo Subianto to expand the military’s role in civilian projects.

The bridges, along with 3,000 clean-water facilities built by the army, were formally inaugurated by Prabowo via video conference last month.

He described the projects as proof the military was “truly the people’s military”.

Maruli said the army’s approach involved training representatives from each region before they helped build the bridges themselves through a self-managed, labour-intensive system.

“When we go there with a self-managed, labour-intensive approach, we gain three advantages. First, the cost is clearly much lower,” he said.

“Second, we revive the spirit of mutual cooperation, gotong-royong, within the community. Third, the money circulates directly in the local area instead of going to a contractor from far away.”

For 16-year-old Ibrahim Firdaus, who lives in Margacinta, the bridge is an important route to school and work.

“I need it to go to school. Because otherwise, I would have to make a U-turn, and also for our parents to go to work,” he told the Singapore-based news outlet.