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| FCC begins work on Mersey Gateway Bridge  The FCC/Kier/Samsung consortium in charge of building the Mersey Gateway has broken ground on the project. The first jobs for the consortium were to clear the site, conduct geotechnical studies of the terrain, and run pavement studies and inspections of the existing bridges that have to be remodelled, together with the approach roads across the wetlands on both sides of the river at Widnes and Runcorn.In the following months the consortium is also scheduled to pitch construction camps will be pitched on both sides of the river; demolish buildings in the vicinity of Ditton, Astmoor, Catalyst Trade Park, Victoria Road and Hutchinson Street; build three cofferdams in the Mersey for the pylons; lay a temporary metal bridge (which will advance from each side of the river and eventually join the two banks) from floating barges to enable vehicle access all along the Main Bridge; improve the Runcorn road system, starting at the Bridgewater junction and the M56 roundabout. The Mersey Gateway project includes the design, construction, financing, maintenance and 30 years' operation of the bridge over the River Mersey in Liverpool, UK, to alleviate the area's traffic problems. The Halton Borough Council and the Merseylink Consortium announced the financial close of the Mersey Gateway on 28 March, and the project was awarded to FCC's consortium in June 2013. FCC won the contract in a tender in which it vied for the concession and construction in June 2013. Its partners in the consortium that won the concession are Bilfinger, Sanef and Macquarie, while for the construction it is accompanied by Samsung CT and Kier. The new bridge will be 2.13 kilometres long and will carry 80, 000 vehicles per day. The project consists of the construction of a new crossing more than two kilometres long over the River Mersey between Widnes and Runcorn, east of the Silver Jubilee Bridge, which was opened in the 1960s and is now choked with traffic. Major urban remodelling work will also be done to seven kilometres of the bridge's approach roads, including about a kilometre of new viaducts. The most unusual part of the entire contract is the six-lane, kilometre-long toll bridge itself. It is a 42-metre-wide cable-stayed structure reaching a maximum height of 125 metres. A multi-lane free-flow toll system will be installed at the intersections, allowing tolls to be collected through automatic number plate recognition thanks to an advanced technological system that does not need to stop the flow of traffic. The value of the construction phase of the project, including the land, is calculated at 725 million euros. The project's total costs/income for the next 30 years are estimated at about 2, 419 million euros. From start to finish, 4, 600 jobs are anticipated to be created either directly or indirectly through inward investment by the process of building, operating and maintaining the new bridge. A series of initial contracts representing a total of 12.10 million euros are ready to be announced by Merseylink, and most of them are for business in the northwest area. They include contracts for demolition work all over the district, a contract for the construction of provisional approach roads to the river site, and contracts for the construction of the cofferdams and the temporary bridge providing access to the bridge's main foundations. The project will benefit not only the Liverpool city-region and its more than 1.6 million inhabitants, but also the entire northwest of England. The Mersey Gateway Project will be one of the biggest infrastructure initiatives in Great Britain for the next few years. Last year the Mersey Gateway was identified as one of the 40 top-priority projects of the British government in the National Infrastructure Plan, and the project has been acknowledged by KPMG as one of the world's 100 most important infrastructure projects. Work will last until the scheduled date for the bridge opening in autumn 2017. Once it is open, the time will come to close the Silver Jubilee Bridge while it is given some basic maintenance and remodelled as a local bridge, with better services for pedestrians and cyclists and better links to the public transport system. Photo caption: An artist's impression of the Mersey Gateway Bridge write your comments about the article :: © 2014 Construction News :: home page |