The Detail: What’s Happening With Auckland Harbor Bridge Repairs?

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Over the weekend, we saw what happens when an unstoppable force (gale) meets a moving object.

He picks up (that truck), hits it against a crucial beam on the Harbor Bridge, and closes half of the Auckland Harbor Bridge for a few weeks.

Tell angry motorists, commuting hours to work, and lots of head scratching on how such scenarios can be avoided in the future.

READ MORE:
* Harbor Bridge Closure – Work on a temporary fix to reopen lanes to start Tuesday
* Damage to Auckland Harbor Bridge – How it happened and what needs to be done to repair it
* Damaged Auckland Harbor Bridge: ‘You can’t get out of there forever’
* Auckland Harbor Bridge – Motorists are asked to work from home or avoid the damaged bridge while urgent repair work continues
* Auckland Harbor Bridge center lanes ‘unsafe’ after accident, but no risk of collapse

Waka Kotahi, or the Transportation Agency, says the bridge worked exactly as it should; This was a strange fact: 60-kilometer-per-hour winds that intensified to over 120 kilometers per hour for just three minutes. It is the closest thing to an act of God that can be achieved, something that no advance planning could foresee.

But try telling that to Joe Bloggs, stuck in traffic for three hours while traveling from Beach Haven to Mount Wellington yesterday morning.

In today’s episode of The detail, Emile Donovan speaks with Brett Gliddon of Waka Kotahi, Michael Barnett of the Auckland Chamber of Commerce and Professor Alistair Woodward of the University of Auckland about the causes, cures and lessons learned about the problems of commuters in the largest city of New Zealand.

At around 11 a.m. last Friday, a strange gust of wind picked up a truck and sent it hurtling towards a life-load beam on the Auckland Harbor Bridge.

While to the untrained eye it appears arched but not broken, below the surface the damage is done: a crucial part of the beam has been cleanly cut from a plate below road level and is no longer holding anything.

This led to the closure of the bridge’s two center lanes, which cross more than 150,000 vehicles every day. While a lane or two may open at this time next week, a permanent solution is much further away.

Waka Kotahi Transportation Services General Manager Brett Gliddon says that a replacement beam will have to be designed, peer-reviewed, and then built, and while all of that work can take place here in New Zealand, it’s not a quick process. .

While the accident was a strange occurrence, Auckland Chamber of Commerce Executive Director Michael Barnett says it demonstrates a failure to convert future planning into a real commitment to better infrastructure.

“When you look at the whole context of Auckland at the time we had power, when Auckland ran out of power, then you look at things like Auckland’s growth, 11 percent a year, but our houses have been growing at five percent. Water : We’re running out of water even though we knew the demand was increasing. And we’ve had congestion forever in Auckland – a lot of words, but just a total lack of commitment, a lack of urgency in the whole thing. ”

Professor Alistair Woodward from the University of Auckland agrees with Barnett that the resulting traffic jams show huge vulnerabilities in Auckland’s transport infrastructure, but has different ideas on how to deal with this.

That includes reducing the number of cars.

“We have not thought enough about the future. It’s all short-term … you know he’s ‘stuck in another lane, he’s widened the road, he’s set on a new road’.

“Of course, all it does is increase the amount of traffic. So it is completely predictable that if we spend millions of dollars tunneling under the port to build more roads, they will also fill up quickly and we will suffer all the environmental and social costs of living in a city dominated by cars. “