Rohan Sinanan, Minister of Works and Transport, along with Camille Robinson-Regis MP for Arouca/Maloney and Minister of Planning and Development and a technical team of the MOWT officially commissioned the B 1/2 Golden Grove Road Bridge on Friday.
This newly constructed bridge will improve connectivity for motorists between the Churchill Roosevelt Highway and the Eastern Main Road, Arouca.
The bridge collapsed in October 2020, after heavy rain, and repairs began in August 2021.
The new bridge cost approximately $12.2 million to construct, Sinanan said. He added the 2020 collapse was caused by the age of the infrastructure.
“We had to put emergency plans in place, so we constructed the Bailey bridge because this road is a major thoroughfare from the main road to the highway, to get to the airport, and it’s a road used by thousands of people on a daily basis.”
“We don’t just build a bridge like that. We have to look at the volume of water, not only the flow now, but the anticipated flow. We got proper designs. We are happy with the outcome.
“What we have now is a bridge that has 100 per cent more capacity than the previous bridge. The previous bridge, in one instance, was 60 years old and about 30 years ago, a temporary structure was placed on top of that. So what we have now is a brand-new bridge built to cater for the flow of water going into the future.”
The benefits of this project include: Less traffic for motorists with the introduction of two lanes over the bridge; the construction of sidewalks for pedestrians; an increased bridge span to accommodate greater volumes of water during heavy rainfall.
Sinanan revealed that the ministry has 92 bridges on its programme and 42 have already been completed.
He said: “The drive is to remove all the wooden bridges in the country and to look at the aged bridges which see infrastructural challenges. By the end of this financial year, we hope to do about 60 of those.”
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