7 News Belize

Work Begins On Major Road Project
posted (March 1, 2016)
The northern highway between the Haulover Bridge and the airport - It is one of the most trafficked and one of the most dangerous stretches of road in the country. But, very shortly, work will commence on the 3.5 mile stretch of road with the purpose of making it 'safe.'

The contract for those works was signed last year with CISCO Construction Limited at some $13.5 million dollars. That works out to almost 4 million dollars per mile, and, so, with works scheduled to start as early next week, we spoke to the Contract Manager for CISCO Construction who gave us an overview of what all the works will include.

Arsenio Burgos, Contracts Manager - CISCO
"What the objective of the road rehabilitation is basically 3 parts: one of them is the safety component and the safety basically is being achieved by widening the road. The road is being widened from 7 meters which is roughly 24 feet wide to 34 feet wide. An example of what that is, if you get off on the airport access road, when you get off from the highway into the airport access road, you see that wide road that's there? That is the new width that this road will be. The second thing that's being done is if there is protection of the road itself, there is quite a bit of what they called river revetment work being done on this job. You can see when you are driving you will see a long the Usher's place and in front of the Courtenay's you will see these concrete beams. Those are erosion protection so that the river does not erode the river bank. There is about 700 linear meters more that will be extended. Most of them are extensions to what's there, repairs of what's there and there is two new sections that will be built where I guess the designers have decided it's the most vulnerable to erosion. The second thing they are doing which is what they called climate resilience, is they are raising the road about a foot."

CISCO has started to survey the area in preparation for the heavy works next week. Now as we said earlier, this 3.5 miles is one of the most heavily trafficked stretches of road. So with all the road works, what traffic setbacks should you expect? Here's the lowdown:

Emanuel Pech
"It's one of the most commuted roads in the country. How will this affect traffic when the works begin?"

Arsenio Burgos, Contracts Manager - CISCO
"I think what you will see is that we are aware of the heavy traffic and we've emphasized to all our workers and even in our building of this road, that safety is of paramount. You see a lot of signs. We don't intend block traffic, but we intend to slow it down by traffic signs. We also do not intend to be working at 7:30. We are a construction company that in the dry season we like to work from 6am to 7pm. We will not be able to work those hours. We are basically contemplating that we will be starting our work at about 8am in the morning when the traffic has passed through and we are probably going to be done at about 4:30pm so that we have time to prepare the road for the evening for that heavy traffic outflow that's coming out and we probably will be working Saturdays."

Emanuel Pech
"At no time will it be completely blocked off?"

Arsenio Burgos, Contracts Manager - CISCO
"That's not the intent."

The contract was signed for 18 months but the contractors say they are anticipating that the works will be completed in 15 months.

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