What do you do with a 101 year old bridge?
The iconic and historic Swing Bridge in downtown Belize City opened in 1923 and spans the Haulover Creek.
It is one of the oldest bridges in the country, constructed in Liverpool, England and then brought to Belize City to be installed.
Up until the early 2000's, the bridge would swing twice a day, once in the morning and again in the evenings, but as the years went by and the structure began to deteriorate, its swinging function was disabled.
And now the historical landmark will be getting a facelift thanks to a collaboration between JICA and the government of Belize.
This afternoon at a press conference in Belmopan, they told us more about the preliminary stages, a survey period which will take place before they begin to work on the bridge:
Evondale Moody, Chief Engineer, MIDH
"In terms of the technical aspects of the ministry of infrastructure we have already done some of the ground work so the team that is here now will be executing the survey works and some more detailed designs and analytics with respect to the bridge structure. We have already given them the general concept of what the government would prefer we have also looked at the technical specs in respect to its cross section and the type of construction that we believe would be more conducive to our environment and to the location of where it is so we will also be supporting them in the gathering of additional information they will also need additional hydraulic information that we will have to gather form the met department and there is also some transportation data that will need to be assembled as well in terms of traffic counts and traffic studies and so the ministry of infrastructure will have a full role in the implementation that they will be executing at this point in time."
"Based on our discussions with Jica the idea is not to have the bridge swing anymore because we don't have sufficient vessels going along the haul over creek that requires swinging movement of that structure. We also have taken into consideration the fact that the BEL China bridge does not swing and the new bridge that we will be building at Belcan will also be a fixed structure so there will be no need for the swing bridge to have that swinging motion anymore."
Hiroyuki Morimoto, Team Leader, Road and Transport Planning
"The objective of our survey is that basically this project was requested by the government of Belize by the government of Japan for the project implementation under Japan's grant aid project so what we need to do is to collect all the necessary information to verify that this project implementation is under Japan's grant aid project. And also we need to do a technical study the engineering design. And also the cost estimate which is all included so this is the objective that's all."
The survey Period is expected to last a year. Approval must be given first for the grant by the Japanese Government. We'l keep following it.
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