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New Civil Engineer recently reported that the bridge stabilisation has progressed and that specialist concrete has been poured into the cast iron pedestals to prevent them collapsing. This means that the bridge is safer for the next stage of repair, which we mentioned in the last email. The stabilisation works are scheduled to complete by the end of February 2023.
It’s worth mentioning again that while the funding arrangement for the rebuilding has been determined, actual funds remain scarce, and the long term funding and maintenance model is undecided. The council prefers to package it up so it can be put into a trust and managed at arms length.
The next step is diversion of a gas main at a cost of £5m, and the letting of contracts so that works on the actual major repairs can begin. We have requested copy of the £200k feasibility report into the Foster/COWI temporary bridge to better understand details of the proposals.
There’s been some press and politics around a proposed bridge toll as a way to close the gap in funding for the rebuild, and whether or not residents would be expected to pay. A historic problem with tolls has been that it cost a significant percentage of the actual toll to collect, and with so much cash sloshing around, there was often significant fraud. Newer technology, such as Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) would presumably lessen these overheads, if not the displeasure.
We are grateful to the Barnes Bugle for alerting us to a detailed video from Mott’s explaining the whole process for those interested in the technicalities:
As we’ve said before, and the detailed video clearly highlights, while there’s plenty of good engineering here, the premise of retaining the cast iron, just to say to Historic England “behind all that framework and those covers there’s still a static lump of Bazalgette’s cast iron – now buried in concrete” is highly questionable. The cast iron is now propped up by steel and concrete achieved with an expensive, slow and complicated set of engineering operations, including a full-size recreation of the pedestals off-site, and not least the temporary addition of support frames (at 16:33 in the above video) which could themselves have replaced the crumbling pedestals permanently in a more robust, quicker, cheaper and more maintainable solution, but will instead end up as scrap at the end of the job, representing a significant lost opportunity.
Although our day counter reminds us that it’s over 3½ years since the bridge closed – which should be the highest public value consideration – it’s good to see this progress.
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