Battling floods, difficult soils and the environmentally sensitive nature of the Amazon rainforest, crews are building a 3,600-meter-long, $400-million bridge with a 400-m-long cable-stayed central section over the Negro River using a 400-barge working platform. The project, marked by a death and environmental controversy, is intended to boost economic development in the Amazon. Brazil’s Manaus-Iranduba Bridge, scheduled for completion by year’s end, will straddle the river close to where the waterway merges with the Amazon River. The span will create a land link between the city of Manaus and the town of Iranduba as well as 30 other, smaller municipalities.
Construction on a 250-MW hydroelectric powerplant in Nicaragua is slated to begin in November after financing for the $700-million project was lined up through a slate of Brazilian firms and regional organizations. Earlier this year, a consortium led by Brazil’s state utility Centrais Eletricas Brasileiras (Eletrobras) and Centrales Hidroelectricas de Centroamerica (CHC)—a subsidiary of the Brazilian construction firm Queiroz Galvao—was awarded a 30-year, build-operate-transfer concession for the Tumarin hydroelectric facility on the Rio Grande de Matagalpa River, located northeast of the capital Managua. When completed in 2014, the 60-meter-high dam will create a 55-sq-kilometer reservoir in Nicaragua’s south Atlantic autonomous
Belgian dredging firm Jan de Nul has won the Panama Canal expansion’s last major contract, a $54.5-million job to dredge and excavate 4 million cu meters at the entrance of the historic waterway’s Pacific access channel. The contract will make way for construction of new and larger locks. + Image Photo: Courtesy of Panama Canal Authority Excavation work to build an access channel from the Panama Canal to new, larger locks at the Pacific entrance of the waterway is more than half completed. Photo: Courtesy of Panama Canal Authority Excavation proceeds at the canal’s Atlantic entrance for the new, larger
Redevelopment of Lower Manhattan’s World Trade Center site has been beset with problems: design changes, funding problems, and political squabbling. And, there wasn’t even much to see at the site for nearly a decade, save for the tops of cranes and a few rumbling trucks, as a tall fence wrapped the perimeter. Photo � Joe Woolhead Redevelopment of Lower Manhattan�s World Trade Center site. Related Links: Downtown Moves Organized Chaos The Next Grand Central But nine years after the September 11 attacks, there finally are tangible signs of progress. A memorial and a tree-filled plaza will be completed next year,
A Houston company has completed construction of a pair of power-generation barges that, when installed later this year in Venezuela, will become the world’s largest floating power-generation facility. Photo: Courtesy Walker Marine Inc. Floating powerplants will move from Signal International Shipyard in Orange, Texas, to Venezuela in September. Waller Marine Inc. completed work on the two $125-million vessels, Margarita I and Josefa Rufina I, earlier this month at the Signal International Shipyard in Orange, Texas. Each barge boasts a single GE 7FA turbine generator and is capable of producing 171-MW. When installed in a prepared basin at Tacoa, Venezuela, near
As Haiti rebuilds after its cataclysmic earthquake, the government there has launched a first-of-its-kind design competition to help replace the country's decimated housing stock.
The effort to build the longest bridge in Peru began in 1978, and, if all goes as planned, the 722-meter-long span over the Madre de Dios River in the Peruvian Amazon will be completed in December. Constructing the Guillermo Billinghurst Bridge—a task spanning more than three decades—will cap the effort to build a paved road in South America from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean: the Interoceanic Highway. The $2.37-billion project to build the road across southern Peru was expanded last year to include the long-awaited span. When completed, the $25.71-million bridge will link the city of Puerto Maldonado
As the works to complete the dam and tunnel that will divert water across the Andean Continental Divide in northern Peru struggle toward completion, the Brazilian company handling the job� is already preparing for the next phase of the project. La Concesionaria Trasvase Olmos S.A., a business entity created solely for the project by general contract Odebrecht Peru, is seeking the 20-year contract that will divert the waters from the Los Olmos project to irrigate 38,000 hectacres on the arid Pacific coast. On May 11, Peruvian President Alan Garcia signed the document clearing the way for the regional government of
