Traian’s Bridge

Traian Basescu started to fancy the bridges from Maracineni. The President has been here for four times during the past week. What is the purpose of these frequent presidential visits? According to his statements, the President checks the rhythm of the rehabilitation of the infrastructure objective.

The latest presidential presence at Maracineni brings good news to everyone: the traffic on the military bridges will restart on Friday at most, everything is going very fast, and the President will be able to celebrate his birthday (as he asked the workers with an imperative tone) where he wishes to. In spite of the fact that the state of necessity hasn’t been declared in Romania, the President’s attitude is like the one of the leaders of the states under military regime. He speaks of deadlines for the employees of a private company, warnings regarding the evaluation of the collaboration between the state’s institutions and a commercial company, value judgments on the mentality between the Romanian and French constructors…

THE DEAL The repairing of the bridge in Maracineni has been directly assigned to a Romanian-French bilateral company named the Colas Society for Railway Constructions-Group Corporation from Iasi. To be more specific, this is only one company, a Romanian-French joint venture, but not two distinct ones, Traian Basescu, the most informed man in Romania, says. The cost of the works reaches 460 billion lei (ROL), which means approximately 14.2 million euros. According to the Ministry of Transports, the reconstruction should end in six months time from its debut (the 17th of May 2005). The project for the bridge’s reconstruction has been made by the Institute of Design for Car, Marine and Air Transports (IPTANA).

WORKS The company from Iasi wants to make the bridge even better that it was. "We will also do the things that should have been done when the bridge had been built. Besides the necessary repairs, we will rehabilitate all the bridge’s piles, we will build the bottom sills and protection barrages", Stefan Hanganu, the Railway-Colas Trading Company director, recently stated for the local press.

The bridge in Maracineni, built in 1932, collapsed in May, due to the floods on the Buzau River. It is a part of the E85 National road, it connects Moldova and Muntenia (the Southeast and the South of the country) and has nine bays, three of which had been seriously damaged by the high waters. The works started with the consolidation of the piles. Three temporal bridges have been built up the objective on the Buzau River to secure the traffic. After the last week’s floods, they have been closed, because they had several broken bridge bents.