Some 4,000 Montrealers were able to get their hands on a small piece of history on Saturday and Sunday, namely a rivet from the old Champlain Bridge, which is these days beginning the final stretch towards its complete deconstruction.
“We had roughly 4,000 coins to distribute, and we distributed them all. People responded very well to our invitation, we are really very happy,” explained the spokesperson for the Jacques Cartier and Champlain Bridges, Nathalie Lessard, on Sunday.
His group held a distribution operation on Saturday and Sunday for 4,000 rivets, huge nails which were used at the time to join the steel components of the bridge. From 9:30 a.m. on Sunday, even in the rain, hundreds of curious people were waiting to retrieve one of the few thousand rivets from the bridge. The same thing had also happened the day before.
At the time, the rivet had to be heated so that it could then be inserted into the holes and come to solidify, explains Mr.me Lessard. The rivets distributed on Saturday and Sunday were also accompanied by a warning indicating that they may contain traces of lead paint, which were mitigated by a protective layer of varnish.
“It’s really interesting from a historical point of view, since we no longer use this type of part today, we instead take bolts with nuts. In other words, it really dates from the time of the construction of the point, towards the end of the 1950s. The bridge was then opened to traffic in 1962,” continues the spokesperson.
The old Champlain Bridge was decommissioned in 2019, when it was replaced by a new $4.4 billion infrastructure, which today connects Montreal to Brossard.
PHOTO GRAHAM HUGHES, THE CANADIAN PRESS
From 9:30 a.m., in the rain, pedestrians and motorists alike waited to collect one of the several thousand rivets from the bridge which are offered as souvenirs, on Nuns’ Island.
Mme Lessard also recalled Sunday that the old Champlain Bridge played a major role in the economic development of Montreal and its suburbs, even if it was plagued by problems during its last years of useful life.
The structure has also been continuing its deconstruction for several months now. “It’s not quite finished, but we’re about 96% of the overall schedule, so things are going very well there too. We are aiming for the end of January 2024 to have everything completed, so we should be on time without any problem,” maintains the manager.
This maintains that the last months of deconstruction will in reality be more “demobilization”. “There are, for example, piers that had been erected and that need to be collected. On the structure as such, the only elements that remain are elements that we want to keep,” she concludes.
With The Canadian Press