The lower deck of the bridge was closed for a year and a half after it was closed for rehabilitation work.
The lower deck of the Luiz I Bridge between Porto and Vila Nova de Gaia will reopen to traffic this Friday at 10:00 a.m., about a year and a half after it was closed for rehabilitation work.
On April 05, an official source from Infraestruturas de Portugal (IP) confirmed to Lusa the date and time of the reopening of the crossing after the bridge rehabilitation work, which began in October 2021 and had a “slippage” in time and cost.
In October 2021, the IP announced that the bridge, designed by Théophile Seyrig, Gustave Eiffel’s collaborator, and inaugurated in 1886, would undergo rehabilitation works lasting about a year.
However, in September last year, the IP admitted that the work would be delayed until March this year, a deadline that has also slipped by two weeks.
According to IP’s Joana Moita, who is in charge of supervising the work, the delays were due to the discovery of more problems in the bridge’s structure than originally planned.
“It was only after the paint was stripped off here on the bridge that we could see that there were more anomalies than we expected and that were foreseen in the project. We had to revise the project and put in more sheet metal, more angle brackets, and that of course delays the work,” he explained.
The cost of the work, initially estimated at 3.3 million euros, ended up at 4.2 million, both because of the more complex intervention than expected, but also because of the raw materials crisis linked to the war in Ukraine, according to the same official.
The official estimated that the intervention will last so long that a new one will not be needed for “at least 30 years or more”.
According to what IP communicated in October 2021, the contract work aimed to repair a number of identified anomalies, most of which were related to surface corrosion of metallic elements, as well as others that would be identified during the course of the work.