Breakthrough announcement: Pre-construction work begins on Barron River bridge replacement
Night works on the Range and a lane reduction over the Barron River will be in place until the end of the month but the long road to a proper fix has started with the kick off of pre-construction work to replace ailing crossing.
Cairns
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A breakthrough announcement that pre-construction work has begun on the replacement of the Barron River bridge has coincided with a perfect storm of traffic delays including Kuranda Range night closures and single lane operation of the ageing river crossing.
The notorious Kuranda Range Rd is yet to fully reopen since a massive deluge brought by ex-Tropical Cyclone Jasper led to landslides and roadway damage.
Since late December, 2023, mobile traffic lights have controlled the single lane flow of traffic at the two trouble spots at a reported cost of $26,000 a day.
On Thursday the Department of Transport and Main Roads announced the return of closures of the troubled-plagued route.
Beginning on February 9 to the end of the month the road will be closed between the hours of 9pm and 4am excluding the weekend.
Banked traffic will be let through from the top and bottom of the range at midnight but TMR has advised traffic can only pass once in each direction for as long as it takes to clear the queued vehicles.
Despite minor landslides and closures due to flooding during the latest rainfall event TMR insists the heavy downpours have not impacted previous repairs. Two pinch points at Streets Creek and the Henry Ross Lookout have been reduced to a single lane for the past 13 months.
Overlapping with the range closure is yet another round of “testing and maintenance” works on the Barron River bridge at Kuranda set to wrap up on February 28.
Only one lane of the bridge will be open and intermittent full closures of up to 10 minutes will be required for 11 days between February 17 and 28.
For the first time since October 2020 when routine inspections identified fatigue in some steel elements of the bridge it was revealed last week at a State Development, Infrastructure and Works Committee that work to replace the bridge had begun.
“The (business) case has been completed and we have an indicative funding envelope for what is required to replace that bridge,” TMR deputy director general of infrastructure Julie Mitchell said.
“We are moving into some pre-construction activity so that the ultimate bridge replacement is not held up and we will be going through the next budget cycle seeking funding for that … but we have enough money to continue moving forward with pre-construction work so we are not held up with the actual solution.”
A total of $15m was allocated by the former government for pre-construction work in June last year for the project that’s expected to cost in the order of $450m and take six years to complete.
Cook MP David Kempton at the infrastructure and works committee Q&A asked probing questions of the panel including how a regional and southeast corner funding imbalance would be tackled and what was being done to end massive budget blowouts on projects such as a $40m cassowary crossing near Tully and a $100m overrun of the Archer River bridge project at Cape York.
“I’m just interested to know how you are going to fix the priorities for the north and how you are going to fund them,” he asked.
Given the recent flooding of the Bruce Highway, resulting in bare supermarket shelves in every regional centre north of Townsville, TMR director general Sally Stannard responded by stating the authority was “very focused” on an inland freight route.
An alternate and extreme inland freight reroute of 2300km was proposed by National Heavy Vehicle Regulator through Cloncurry and Mt Isa to Cairns in response to the severing of coastal routes.
“I have been staring at the maps a couple of times this week to see what’s open and closed overnight,” she said.
“We are experiencing some one in one hundred year events, we think, around Ingham at the moment … the network is under pressure ... (betterment) is high on our radar, we will be looking at the number of closures along the Bruce that have occurred and the frequency of those closures and then we will be looking to the west to apply that same logic in our conversations with the commonwealth.”
Advance Cairns in a 2024-25 federal budget submission has called for the completion of the Kennedy Developmental Road (Hann Hwy), which requires about 10.8km of sealing works between The Lynd and Hughenden at an estimated cost of $30m but the project is yet to attract funding.
The TMR deputy director general (infrastructure management) Julie Mitchell blamed huge cost blowouts of Queensland civil projects on an “unprecedented ” and “unforeseeable ” international increase in building materials.
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Originally published as Breakthrough announcement: Pre-construction work begins on Barron River bridge replacement
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