A platform that will soon be filled
The numbers of working areas in a construction site that is running slightly ahead of its provisional schedule are increasing, and the most visible is the filling of the platform with 750,000 tons, almost half a million cubic metres of sand. The objective here is to complete this part of the site before the Christmas holidays.
In spite of a few setbacks associated with the supply of materials, the team from Bouygues TP Monaco have identified new borrow pits for the materials to be used to fill the platform. Two sites are currently supplying the required sand. In the past few days, 320,000 tons of this material have arrived from Marseille and another 430,000 tons from Piombino, in Italy. “We have succeeded in optimizing the transportation, which means that the number of passages, 32 in all, is slightly lower than we had initially forecast”, says Christophe Hirsinger, Director of Bouygues TP Monaco, with satisfaction. This will be followed by “a big year of land treatment”, explains the manager. “We have begun the trials, which consists in a technique known as jet-grouting: we inject grout into certain areas along the whole coastal portion. This will require between five and six machines starting in December”.

THE MARINA REMODELLED
Christophe Hirsinger is delighted with the start of the first civil engineering preparation work for the future port, “which is going well”. This will see its design develop. It will incorporate the attractive stone arches that currently support Boulevard Louis II, which will be highlighted, as they will be traced by the new quays, which will be still able to take boats of up to a maximum of 10 metres long. The site will only be excavated when the works on the entire new district have reached their final finishing stages. From the start, in fact, it was decided for a logistical reason to fill in the port and close it off with a sea wall before removing the filling material from it: that is, doing the excavation towards the end of the operations and gaining an extensive working area, thereby facilitating various tasks. This means that the excavation work will, in all likelihood and very logically, only be carried out in 2024.
This article was originally published in the November 2019 edition of the Gazette de Monaco.