A bridge carrying traffic over the M6 for half of a century became torn down in below 48 hours.
Demolition specialist S Evans & Sons removed the south lag structure over the M6 on behalf of predominant contractor John Sisk & Son and shopper Nationwide Highways.
Time lapse photographs launched by Nationwide Highways reveals the short elimination of a bridge spanning the M6 at junction 10. Work performed in the early hours of the day earlier than this present day morning, extra than four hours earlier than schedule.
The bridge – which has carried traffic over the M6 for some 50 years – has been modified by a extra in trend and wider, four-lane structure to contend with congestion at the busy junction.
Nationwide Highways and Walsall Council, supported by the Shaded Nation Native Enterprise Partnership, have joined forces to fund the £78m support of the junction.
Contractor John Sisk & Son has been laborious at work on the venture since unhurried 2019, and became hailed at the terminate of 2021 for its spotless safety file on the plan, having accomplished 500,000 work hours with out a single of the 100-solid team taking atomize day thru damage.
Junction 10 became closed from Friday night until 1.30am on Monday morning to enable the south bridge to be removed. A rapidly of machines swept on to the positioning to ‘nibble’ away the bridge earlier to the facet road became cleared and then reopened to traffic.
Nationwide Highways venture supervisor Annie Hyett emphasised the challenges moving about the operation.
“Demolishing a bridge of this size is a elaborate operation nonetheless the entirety went precisely to devise and we were elated that we were in a location to procure the motorway originate a whole lot of hours earlier than planned,” she acknowledged.
“A ample thank-you to all individuals who became in a location to keep away from the dwelling the place which that you can moreover imagine as it helped us lower the queues of traffic and delays to journeys. We like that closing the motorway does trigger some bother and easiest elevate out so when we completely mandatory to guard our team and facet road customers.
“Road customers will soon be in a location to just like the corpulent benefits of the improvements to the junction which would perhaps attend fight the traffic support-u.s.a.persevered at this bottleneck for lots of years.”
The existing north bridge can be attributable to be demolished inner about a weeks.
The 2 new bridges were built alongside existing ones and will double the quantity of traffic lanes correct thru the junction from two to four.