Engineering

Construction of the Samuel De Champlain Bridge represented one of North America’s biggest worksites. With its impressive scope broadly visible along the Saint Lawrence River, the Samuel De Champlain Bridge has changed the urban look of Montreal and has become a new symbol for the metropolis. Conceived in keeping with sustainable development practices, the project leads the way in modern engineering and urban integration.

The new bridge will have a useful lifespan of 125 years.

A challenging 42-month timeline has been established for construction of the new bridge. This presents a great engineering challenge, particularly since it coincides with other major roadwork, including work on the old Champlain Bridge, the Turcot Interchange and the Bonaventure Expressway. Both in terms of the work itself and communication and traffic management, Signature on the Saint Lawrence relied on substantial coordination and cooperation between the teams handling these major projects to minimize their impact on citizens. Similarly, significant effort went into planning construction activities to enable and facilitate the work of the hundreds of workers who maintained the flow day after day over the entire worksite of the Samuel De Champlain Bridge corridor.

To meet the challenging timeline, the decision was made to maximize the prefabrication of concrete and steel parts and assemble some on site and some off-site. For this purpose, a total of five jetties (three for the Samuel De Champlain Bridge and two for the new Île-des-Sœurs bridge) were created during the preparatory phase of work (June to November 2015). They also allowed for dry construction of various parts of the bridge and served as docks for mooring the many vessels used on the Saint Lawrence River.