2023-08-19 01:12:09
Following the closure of the Touzel Bridge, Quebec taxpayers spent millions of dollars to charter a plane and repair the infrastructure constituting Minganie’s only road link with the rest of Quebec.
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It was on Thursday that the Ministère des Transports du Québec published the over-the-counter contract of $6 million concluded with the company Nolinor aviation.
We can read in the Government of Quebec’s electronic tendering system (SEAO) that it was an “emergency situation” requiring “the transport of goods in the Minganie region following the closure of Route 138” caused by a crack discovered last May on the Touzel bridge.
Added to this is an amount of $425,000 paid to Stellaire Construction for the repair of the infrastructure, an amount also paid in “emergency situations”. And these expenses are not an exhaustive list of the costs incurred by the closure of the bridge.
“It is certain that in an emergency, these are necessary expenses, so that we can deliver aid to the victims by cutting the road. There are foodstuffs that must be surrendered, basic foodstuffs. We see that it is expensive,” noted Yannick Hémond, professor of resilience, risk and disasters in the geography department of UQAM.
This is far from the first time that Quebec has had to intervene urgently on this sandy point hosting Route 138. In a report dated 2020, the consulting engineering firm WSP described the 1760 m road corridor neighboring of “very vulnerable and fragile, and most of the time requiring emergency work”.
“Maintaining and maintaining this road link entails an approximate cost of $1 million every five years”, according to an engineer from the Ministry of Transport consulted by WSP, one can read in the document commissioned by Quebec.
We forwarded WSP’s report to the secretary-treasurer of the Professional Association of Government Engineers of Quebec, engineer Andy Guyaz.
“It is perhaps not normal that we put money every year to maintain the network in this sector, while it is being degraded by the river, by the waves, the increase in the level of the river,” he asked.
Like Yannick Hémond, Andy Guyaz points out that emergency interventions on the road network cost the Government of Quebec more than those that are planned.
Acting preventively, rather than urgently, to limit costs is far from simple, because you have to take into account the financial and labor issues in this sector located more than 100 kilometers east of Sept -He is.
“For the government too, it is always more complicated to do work in the regions, particularly on Route 138 following Sept-Îles. There are fewer companies, more travel, more mobilization for more staff who have to travel. Necessarily, that generates additional costs”, explained Andy Guyaz.
Faced with climate change, the Ministry of Transport must act more quickly, according to Yannick Hémond, who indicates that the case of the Touzel bridge is one of the many examples of the necessary climate adaptation of the road network in Eastern Quebec.
“That’s the big question we have. Are our governments ready to adapt? It’s one second to midnight. The Ministry of Transport has enormous challenges in its infrastructure to adapt to climate change,” he said.
The Quebec Ministry of Transport might not answer our questions on Friday. The cause of the crack discovered in May at the Touzel Bridge, which spans the Sheldrake River, remains unknown.
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