Via Fijatevos /QCostarica
The Bailey bridges are all dismantled on the General Cañas Highway and all is right with the world. After five months, the giant crater that opened up in July and had to be bridged by temporary portable structures is finally fixed.
The bridges were dismantled last Thursday night and the 12-centimeter-thick covering of asphalt laid on over the weekend, finally ending the traffic snarls made worse when an 84-ton mobile crane collapsed one of the Bailey bridges able to sustain only 40 tons.
The bumbling of CONAVI, the road designers, has put to the test the legendary patience of the Costa Rican people. In late June, when the heavy rains washed out a huge crater in the road, long-suffering motorists had to find a new Alajuela and Heredia route to and from San Jose.
The Bailey bridges were brought in to span the gap and things settled down to a sort of abnormal normality. Then, the crane tried to go over one of the sadly overloaded bridges, which collapsed. Since then traffic has been a nightmare for commuters.
CONAVI officials, after they had finished blaming nature for inundating them and the inadequate culvert under the road, predicted that work would take until the end of the year to fix things. Then the crane came along and work was sped up feverishly.
Fortunately, the crane incident occurred after the larger $3 million culvert was finished. After that it was a matter of bringing in 2,500 cubic meters of fill dirt to put over the new culvert and to add the cap of asphalt, while President Laura Chinchilla drummed her fingernails impatiently on her desk.
Update: Conavi reports that repairs on the infamous platina bridge over the Virilla River will take ten months to repair. The good news is that for the first nine of those months, the work will be on the structure under the bridge and motorists will not even be aware of that.
Commentary: We will hope that this is the last we have to report on the giant cavern under the General Canas Highway for a decade or so. But there’s no doubt that Ticos — especially road builders — don’t react well to being rushed, which the mobile crane forced on them.