Last Updated on July 25, 2024 by YGK News Staff
Access to the LaSalle Causeway for pedestrians, cyclists, and vehicles is expected to return by the end of the summer, as Public Services and Procurement Canada (PSPC) announced that Priestly Demolition Inc. will be tasked with installing a temporary modular bridge that will allow vehicle and pedestrian access while construction on a new, permanent bridge is underway.
Priestly is the company that has handled the demolition of the old LaSalle Causeway, and given that the demolition project was finished ahead of schedule, stakeholders were not disappointed to hear they’d be handling this next phase as well.
Daniel Beals, Operations Manager at St. Lawrence Cruise Lines, said seeing that company take over this phase of the project was good news based on their track record of overachieving so far.
“They’re the same company that demolished the old bridge,” Beals said.
“They demolished it ahead of schedule and very efficiently. So that gave me a lot of confidence because they did such a quick and solid job with the demolition. I can see why they gave them the contract for the modular bridge because they’ve shown themselves to be more reliable than the previous construction company.”
St. Lawrence Cruise Lines and other stakeholders attended a briefing held by PSPC on Friday afternoon where the update was shared, and Beals says he thinks everyone walked away feeling relatively confident about the direction things were headed in.
He says what they need now is a schedule in writing that they can plan around.
“I feel like the businesses that were there at that debriefing were fairly pleased with the answer they got,” Beals said.
“I think they would have wished that it could have been in place a little quicker, but I think whether it’s hotels in town, or local businesses, or the Marine businesses – what we would need is something in writing that we can all look at as a schedule.”
Beals said that the impression that has been given is that the modular portion of the bridge would take roughly 3 hours to move both to open the marine channel and to move back into place with the rest of the bridge.
His expectation is that marine navigation will remain open a couple times a month, closing vehicular and pedestrian access to the bridge for effectively an entire day of every two weeks.
He says while people are generally pleased with last week’s update, they’re going to need guarantees around accessible times soon in order to make concrete plans.
Beals says both affected businesses and everyone impacted by the Causeway’s closure to vehicles and foot traffic will have to have to compromise a bit in order to make things work smoothly.
“At a certain point, they need to guarantee how many times so that the business interests that are in town… they know when they won’t have access,” Beals said.
“We understand that it’s not going to be perfect for either side, but my guess is what we could be looking at is one or two Sundays a month where they open it up.”
Specific dates and times of opening the marine navigation channel have not yet been decided on, but PSPC says updates will be shared as details are determined.
In the latest release from PSPC however, the organization says they expect the bridge to be removed and reinstalled “a couple” times through the navigation season to allow access for marine traffic.
They also added in the release that no decisions have been made about the frequency of marine access through the channel in 2025 and onwards.
At this point, specific details regarding technical elements of how the modular portion of the bridge will actually be moved have not been publicly shared, nor has the schedule of construction – however Beals said that Priestly has committed to keeping a barge and a crane on site to help with the process.
The site supervisor of the project, Armando Vizinho, said that he didn’t know any information about the project, but that a meeting was to be held on Wednesday where he expects himself and other employees to learn more.
The project manager for Priestly who could speak to details of the project was unavailable to speak due to being on vacation when contacted by YGK News.
The construction of the temporary modular bridge is expected to be completed by the end of September, at which point a schedule of marine access is also expected to be available.
