Quebec is hopeful of being able to deliver the work in the Louis-Hippolyte-La Fontaine tunnel a little less than a year late, despite the ventilation towers being more damaged than expected. That said, the work will have to be condensed and costs are likely to jump.
“I think we’ll get there. The deadlines announced by the ministry are reasonable, and we share them. We are still on a renovation site, we can always have discoveries, you never know, but I think we will get there,” explained Wednesday the director of the major tunnel renovation project at the Renouveau La Fontaine consortium. , Stéphane Campedelli.
PHOTO CHARLES-WILLIAM PELLETIER, SPECIAL COLLABORATION, THE PRESS
Stéphane Campedelli
Its teams invited the media to a major tour of the site, a little more than five days after The Press would have revealed that the bridge-tunnel mega-construction site would be at least almost a year late, with the end of the closure of three out of six lanes of the infrastructure now being planned for the fall of 2026. The end of the project, which was until ‘here set at 2026, could therefore go even further.
There are mainly two factors which explain these delays: first, an equipment breakdown which occurred on an installation supporting the vault of the tunnel, then ventilation towers “significantly more damaged than expected”, said Mr. Campedelli, making the tour of these infrastructures external to the site.
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PHOTO CHARLES-WILLIAM PELLETIER, SPECIAL COLLABORATION, THE PRESS
The ventilation towers are more damaged than expected.
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PHOTO CHARLES-WILLIAM PELLETIER, SPECIAL COLLABORATION, THE PRESS
This piece of equipment recently broke down.
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PHOTO CHARLES-WILLIAM PELLETIER, SPECIAL COLLABORATION, THE PRESS
The tunnel roof was badly damaged at the start of the work.
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PHOTO CHARLES-WILLIAM PELLETIER, SPECIAL COLLABORATION, THE PRESS
Workers work in the tunnel.
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Even in terms of construction, unforeseen events arose around the ventilation towers, the manager admitted. “All the support panels rested on the lower part of the tower, instead of being held on the structure themselves. This is a mode of operation that was not planned. This does not allow us to dismantle the lower part to replace everything. »
To date, approximately 90% of the concreting of the first tube, heading south, has been completed; only nine sections of the vault remain to be concreted. It will then be necessary to carry out painting and lighting work, among other things. Including the additional work on the ventilation towers, we will then only switch to the north tube in spring 2025, instead of this summer as was initially planned.
A hefty bill
In short, one thing is certain: the initial costs of 2.5 billion will no longer hold. ” It’s logic. Now, we just have to see based on the envelopes planned for the risks to establish what the additional costs required are,” cautiously said the director of major projects for Greater Montreal at the Ministry of Transport, Martin Giroux, who also participated in the visit.
PHOTO CHARLES-WILLIAM PELLETIER, SPECIAL COLLABORATION, THE PRESS
Martin Giroux
Very few details are yet filtering out on the bill, but according to our information, several scenarios are being considered by the authorities, including an increase of at least a few hundred million.
Quebec, for its part, says it is “currently in negotiations with the Renouveau LaFontaine consortium to assess all of the impacts of additional work on the contract, mobility and government planning.” “We will not make any additional comments so as not to harm these negotiations,” the office of the Minister of Transport, Geneviève Guilbault, mentioned on Wednesday.
Mr. Giroux remains optimistic. “We still have the experience of the first tube, and we can think that the work in the next tube will be similar, but here we will go more in terms of productivity [de nos équipes]. And we are confident that what we have seen in recent months will allow us a certain reliability for the future,” he concluded, thus opening the door to the acceleration of certain works.
An electrified worker
Beyond the cost, health and safety issues at work have also been at the heart of discussions with the union in recent weeks, while a worker was electrified on the site on May 9 while he was found on a scaffolding. His helmet had hit a hanging electrical box and while trying to free it, he felt an electric shock from his right hand to his left hand. “He felt a shock, then a tingling yes, but it didn’t go further than that,” confirmed Mr. Campedelli when speaking about this case. “It was due to a defect to be corrected which was taken care of by the project management. It’s a work in progress, we are in constant progress, it would be a blind eye to say that everything is perfect, that we are unassailable, that there is no risk. Our approach is to say: we are always at risk and we must always progress,” he added, ensuring that security is the subject of training or workshops on a recurring basis.