Six days a week working to meet deadline
Work site now running 20 hours per day, six days a week in order to meet deadline
A tight timetable has gotten even tighter for builders of the new $4.24-billion Champlain Bridge.
In the last two years, Signature on the Saint Lawrence — the consortium building the new bridge — has endured two strikes, and an altered plan to deliver its materials due to weight load restrictions on the old bridge. Instead of transporting most of the materials for the bridge by truck, the consortium has had to use barges pulled on a winch through the St. Lawrence River’s heavy current.
So this fall, builders added another work shift to the day, and added weekend shifts as well. The work site now runs six days a week, for roughly 20 hours per day.
Daniel Genest, the director of coordination for Signature on the Saint Lawrence, said without those measures, the project would be delivered six months behind its Dec. 1, 2018 deadline. SSL will be penalized $100,000 per day for every day it is late for the first week, and $400,000 per day for every day after that point.
Despite the financial incentive to deliver on time, the crown corporation maintaining the old Champlain Bridge has been asked to come up with a solution to keep the old bridge standing for an extra two years, but it will cost $250 million to put that solution in place.
Standing on a man-made jetty between the Island of Montreal and the South Shore overlooking the work site, Genest said crews are working hard to make sure the project is on time.
“We’re roughly at the 60 per cent completion mark, so we have a large and demanding year ahead of us to finish on time,” Genest said during a visit by reporters to the site on Friday.
Genest is hoping for a warm and wind-free winter coming up, because crews have to stop work in very rainy and windy conditions.
“We’re hoping for no winter and no wind or rain for the next 14 months,” Genest joked.
And it’s starting to look a lot more like a bridge. Most of the posts jutting out of the water, known as pier legs, have been placed, and the pier caps, the wide W-shaped pieces that will hold up the bridge’s deck, will be all placed by the end of October. Crews are now working on placing the bridge’s box girders, which form the base of the roadbed.
Frédéric Guitard, the manager of the cable-stayed portion of the bridge, is working on what designers call the bridge’s signature look, massive steel cables, holding the roadbed up vertically from a tower as high as the Olympic Stadium.
The work to build the main pylon has been painstaking, and is nearly half finished since it started last year. Crews have been putting together massive concrete blocks, made in factories located in St-Eugène-de-Grantham, like Lego blocks. Each one is different from the other. The pieces are then tensioned together using massive steel cables. Guitard said the hardest part of building the pylon is completed. The highest part of the tower will be constructed by pouring concrete in place and lifting it onto the structure using a system of jacks.
“We’re pouring the concrete by a height of six metres at a time, and we won’t be using cranes anymore,” Guitard said.
With three lanes for car traffic in each direction, another two lanes reserved for the Réseau électrique métropolitain commuter rail system, and a bicycle path, the new Champlain Bridge will be one of the widest bridges in the world.
With just 13 and a half months left in the project, there are now 825 employees that are part of the project, an increase of 25 per cent from this past summer.
But it’s not yet clear who is paying for the extra employees and the doubled shifts. According to the deal reached between Signature on the Saint Lawrence and Infrastructure Canada, the consortium is not responsible for delays that are out of its control. The consortium has filed a lawsuit against Infrastructure Canada for costs related to weight restrictions imposed on the old bridge. Genest said the bridge will be breathtaking for anyone who drives on it.
“‘Wow’, is going to be the first word of anyone who drives on this bridge when it’s completed,” Genest said. “We’re building an infrastructure that will be the new gateway to Montreal. It’s a very aesthetically pleasing bridge, and the fact that is has a nice curve to it will give motorists a nice view of downtown Montreal. It will be a work of art.”
He added that he and the workers building the bridge feel immense pride to be part of the project.
“Our workforce, I’d say is 99.5 per cent from Quebec. They’re exceptionally proud to participate in this project. We’re kinda putting our personal lives aside for 42 months because we want to deliver a great project that will be standing for 125 years.”