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’re still on a renovation site, we can always have discoveries, you never know, but I think we’ll get there,” explained Stéphane Campedelli, director of the major tunnel renovation project at the Renouveau La Fontaine consortium, on Wednesday.
Its teams invited the media to a major tour of the site, a little more than five days after La Presse revealed that the bridge-tunnel mega-construction site would be at least almost a year late, the end of the closure of three lanes out of six of the infrastructure is now planned for fall 2026. The end of the project, which was until now set for 2026, could therefore go even further.
There are mainly two factors which explain these delays: first, a breakdown of equipment which occurred on an installation supporting the vault of the tunnel, then ventilation towers “clearly more damaged than expected”, said Mr. Campedelli, making the tour of these infrastructures external to the site.
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 onto 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, in the south direction, has been completed; this means that only nine sections of the vault remain to be concreted. Painting and lighting work will then be required, among other things. Including additional work on the ventilation towers, the switch to the north tube will not take place until spring 2025, instead of this summer as originally planned.
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.
Very few details have yet filtered through 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 [of our teams]. 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.
