New Bridge across River Nile at Jinja

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The Jinja Bridge across the Nile River in AfricaHyundai E&C entered the Ugandan construction market by receiving an order to build the Jinja Bridge in November 2013. The Jinja Bridge project is expected to improve the poor road networks and contribute largely to the economic development of the African country.Africa is rich in precious natural resources. With the growing young population and the high birth rate, African countries are considered having unlimited possibilities. However, a lack of transportation infrastructure prevents the African logistics market from working, ending up with slowing national economic growth.The Kenyan Port of Mombasa is the major gateway to Uganda’s trade. Nonetheless, as Mombasa is about 1,000 kilometers away from the Ugandan capital Kampala, it takes at least 10 days to get to Kampala from the port by road. To reduce time taken by cargo from Mombasa to Kampala, the Ugandan government was determined to construct a new road and a bridge and signed the agreement with the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), a governmental agency established by Japan to coordinate economic and social cooperation with developing countries, in January 2010.The Zenitaka-Hyundai joint venture received the deal to construct the Jinja Bridge from the Uganda National Roads Authority. The achievement was attributable mainly to the use of temporary bridge and coffering which is likely to minimize the disturbance of the ecosystem and the pollution of drinking water sources.The Jinja Bridge project aims to build a 525-meter four-lane bridge and a 2,105-meter accident road across the Nile River in the Jinja area within 55months. Hyundai E&C has a 49 percent share (worth 627.0 billion dollars) of the deal while the Zenitaka Corporation will hold the remaining 51 percent(worth 652.6 billion dollars).All eyes in the Ugandan government and its neighboring countries were on the Jinja Bridge in that it is the first cable-stayed bridge in Eastern Africa. To construct the landmark bridge, the construction site used multi-strand cables and selected the automatic climbing formwork system to erect 82.2-meter high pylons.One of the most unexpected obstacles to the project was to deal with extremely hard rock during the pile foundation construction. It took more than three months to mobilize new and additional equipment befitting extremely hard rock, which increased the schedule by over four times. To solve this problem, the construction site worked on speedy construction around the clock.The Jinja Bridge is remarkably beef up logistics capabilities in the “Pearl of Africa” as well as become the country’s landmark as the first cable-stayed bridge in Eastern Africa.

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