Lagos Cable Pylon Bridge: A New Tourist Centre in the Making Cuts to the Bone
Curiously, when Sunday Trust visited the construction site, which is accessed through Osborne Road, Ikoyi, our correspondent marveled at the architectural design of the new Ikoyi-Lekki link bridge. The bridge is 1.358 metres long while the height of the cable pylon is 98 meters from water level. This is Nigeria’s first cable stay bridge and […]
Curiously, when Sunday Trust visited the construction site, which is accessed through Osborne Road, Ikoyi, our correspondent marveled at the architectural design of the new Ikoyi-Lekki link bridge. The bridge is 1.358 metres long while the height of the cable pylon is 98 meters from
water level. This is Nigeria’s first cable stay bridge and first of such ever constructed by Julius Berger, the main contractors of the project.
The bridge project was awarded by Lagos State Governor, Barrister Raji Fashola to Messrs Julius Berger on March 13, 2009, while work started on the site on May 11, 2009. The project was expected to have been completed within a period of three years and two months, which means that it is to be commissioned in October, 2012. According to an official of the Lagos State Ministry of Works, who was at the site when Sunday Trust visited the construction site, the bridge was about 95 per cent ready.
The bridge was conceived as a solution to the enigmatic traffic chaos on Lekki-Epe highway, particularly at Elegushi roundabout and Lekki Estate Phase One. It was also believed that construction of the bridge would reduce the time spent on travelling along Falomo Bridge, Alfred Rewane Road, Independence Bridge and Ahmadu Bello Way in Victoria Island.
One of Julius Berger’s site engineers, Honse Bush, who was so enthusiastic about the project, said it was the first of it’s kind ever by Julius Berger.
“This project is similar to those found in Europe. The 1.57 kilometre long Lekki-Ikoyi Link Bridge comprises a 722-meter full-span approach bridge and the main cable stayed segmental bridge of 635 meters in length at the centre of which is a 90-meter high pylon. Walkways on both sides of the bridge are two meters wide with width of the two main carriage ways, east and west-bound respectively, at 2 x 4 meters each”, he said
“It is a suspended bridge along a stretch of 225 meters on a centrally constructed pylon and it cannot open for ship to pass. The cable is there to carry the weight of the pylon and bridge in position. The with is necessary because of the ship under the bridge. The cables were made by a special company in France. I’m impressed! Honestly, this is the first time we are building this type of bridge and first time I will be part of it. The one in Europe was built by an American firm and there is another one in Canada of this type, but this is the first time Julius Berger is building this type of structure and for me, this is first time experience,” he said.
He said as the first cable bridge in Nigeria, it would connect two districts of Lekki on the Lekki Peninsula and Ikoyi on Lagos Island, adding that the bridge would be supported on 37 piers.
With filigree appearance, the pylon has ‘A’ shaped up to 50 meters before it form a fillet. Bush said the top of the pylon head is constructed with fabricated components.
Also, an official of the state’s ministry of work told Sunday Trust that the bridge was a suspended one in which the deck (the load-bearing portion) is hung below suspension cables on vertical suspenders adding that the bridge is designed to have a maximum of 3.5 per cent vertical alignment and minimum radius of 350 meters horizontal alignment with 90 meters pylon height from water level.
Additional facilities on the bridge include 2.3mx2 walkway, streetlights and cable ducts. The cable bridge has a length of 170 meters and a height of 98 meters from water level, and consists of two spans with an average of 85 meters.
“The 1,358-metre long bridge is being constructed across the lagoon flowing towards Osborne in Ikoyi and Lekki Scheme1 Housing Estate. The project is anchored on Admiralty Way end of the new Lekki-Ikoyi Link Bridge expected to be terminated at Alexander Road in Ikoyi. The bridge is also of a maximum of 3.5 per cent vertical alignment and minimum radius of 350 meters horizontal alignment with 98 meters pylon height from water level. Additional facilities to be added upon full completion are 2.3m x 2 walkway, streetlights and cable ducts.
At the entrance point of the bridge, there is a large radius of roundabout still under construction which the official said would be completed before the commissioning of the bridge in October.
The German subsidiary Julius Berger International GmbH (formerly Bilfinger Berger Nigeria GmbH) handled the planning, design and support of Julius Berger Nigeria, including logistics and supply of materials and equipment that were difficult or impossible to procure in Nigeria.
How pylon cable is constructed?
According to Ron Fasick, in his contribution on eHow website, “Pylons support the weight of the bridge deck through a system of cables. Bridge pylons rest on a foundation that begins deep in the ground below the surface of the water. A system of cables is attached to each side of the bridge and then to the pylons, which transfers the entire weight of the structure through the foundation and into the ground. ‘A’ cable-stayed bridge is a bridge that consists of one or more columns (normally referred to as towers or pylons), with cables supporting the bridge deck.
“There are two major classes of cable-stayed bridges: In a harp design, the cables are made nearly parallel by attaching them to various points on the tower(s) so that the height of attachment of each cable on the tower is similar to the distance from the tower along the roadway to its lower attachment. In a fan design, the cables all connect to or pass over the top of the tower(s).
“Compared to other bridge types, the cable-stayed is optimal for spans longer than typically seen in cantilever bridges, and shorter than those typically requiring a suspension bridge. This is the range in which cantilever spans would rapidly grow heavier if they were lengthened, and in which suspension cabling does not get more economical, were the span shortened.”
Benefits
According to the Lagos state official, the Lagos project was conceived and partly designed as an alternative route meant to address the traffic problem associated with the area, and to shorten travel time between Ikoyi and Lekki as against what currently obtains, where motorists, on a bad day when traffic is hectic on Lekki-Epe Expressway, spend hours before reaching their destinations.
“This project was the first to be signed with Julius Berger by the Governor Fashola administration and it will be commissioned by him. This is a laudable achievement”, the official said.
The bridge, he said, could be a tourist centre since many residents in the state were seeing such a huge monument for the first time.
The challenges faced included building the 90m-high pylon and bridge above water in segments, handling heavy weights up to 250 tons. The contractor also had to overcome access and traffic challenges throughout the construction of the bridge, and had to ensure the batching plant was producing concrete of a sufficient type and quality.
The concrete for the foundation piles and the pylon had to be transported to site. Challenges with regard to the casting process include getting the concrete mix right so that it remained workable for the specified length of time in the hot and humid climate. It also needs to be of the right consistency to enable suitable filling of formwork. The early, high and final strength of the concrete also needed to be just right to enable a suitably rapid pace of work to be maintained. And lastly the aesthetics were important. Julius Berger had to achieve a fine and smooth finish on all concrete segments.
Also, as part of the design, a toll gate has been erected at the Admiralty end or entrance point (depending on the entry point). How much a motorist is to pay is yet to be determined by the Lagos state government.
Cancer dramatically changed the outlook of one Nigerian and prompted him to save countless other lives.
In August 2010, Olabisi Bokinni was 24 years old and working at a management consultancy firm in Ikeja, Lagos when she learnt that her brother, who was based in the United States, was diagnosed with leukaemia. “At the time, I did not have a clue about cancer,” she says. After several weeks of tests and chemotherapy, she was told that his doctors were looking for a match for a stem cell donation to restore his weakened cells.
Doctors focused on his siblings, and sent a package for blood samples to be taken. Weeks later, Bokinni was told that she was a possible match. Her brother’s hospital prepared her paperwork for an American visa, but it was denied. She remembers the day vividly: “The last thing I asked my interviewer was, ‘You want him to die?’”
It was obvious that they needed another plan, so she was sent to the bone marrow registry in Cape Town, South Africa for the procedure. When she finally saw the package of her stem cells that would be delivered to the hospital in the US, Bokinni recalls pleading with the doctors; “Deliver it to save my brother’s life!”
Family connections are the likeliest match for stem cell transplants. If a patient does not have a sibling, doctors search within the same ethnic group because there is a higher compatibility for certain genes called Human Leukocyte Antigen (HLA) markers. This means that Bokinni’s brother could have found it difficult to find a donor in the US. African Americans make up only eight per cent of the bone marrow registry in the US, and according to the National Marrow Donor Programme, African-American patients have less than a 17 per cent chance of finding a bone marrow match, compared to 70 per cent of Caucasian patients.
While working in the finance industry in the US, a Nigerian-American lawyer, Seun Adebiyi, was faced with these odds. He was diagnosed with lymphoblastic lymphoma and stem cell leukaemia in January 2009. “Chemotherapy would buy me time, but not save my life. I needed a system reset,” he explains. Unfortunately, this was not going to prove easy to find in the US, and so he started looking to the country of his birth.
Adebiyi knew that one in five black people in the world is Nigerian, and the country is home to a quarter of Africa’s population. With almost 400 distinct ethnic groups, the size and diversity made it the perfect place to establish a bone marrow registry. “I decided that I wanted to start a registry in Nigeria for diaspora Africans to be able to draw from a pool of donors,” he says.
There was no registry or infrastructure in Nigeria to help with his goal, but Adebiyi is not one to shy away from a challenge. He passed the bar exam, required to qualify fully in the US, while undergoing chemo-therapy. “I wouldn’t take no for an answer,” he says simply. South Africa had the only other registry in Africa, and he made a deal with them to store his initial data. While still searching for a match of his own, Adebiyi made the trip to Nigeria with a goal of finding 10,000 donors. He held the first drive at the Nigerian Law School in Lagos. After addressing about 400 students, he handed out information and testing kits, and wrote in his journal of the day; ‘I am crushed in a sea of outstretched hands. We are completely swamped. History.’
Seeing the number of people who came forward ready to save lives convinced him that a registry would work. He joined forces with two doctors at the University of Nigeria Teaching Hospital in Enugu -Ifeoma Okoye and Sunday Ocheni. The greatest challenge in getting started was finding the funds to buy the necessary computers and software. “Seun had to buy everything with his personal money,” explains Ocheni, while asserting that, “funds still remain our greatest challenge impeding the growth of the registry.”
Okoye adds to their list of challenges: getting reliable internet access and trying to maintain an independent uninterrupted power supply. “The main thing is, I am so passionate about it now, in a way that I was not passionate about my prestigious job on Wall Street,” says Adebiyi. “For the first 26 years of my life, I had it all planned out. Then I felt that I was going to die for six months, now I am healthy again and ready to embrace life.” He has high praise for the doctors who are working with him, but hopes that one day he’ll be able to pay them a salary. “I don’t need one because my own gratitude is enough,” he adds.
Adebiyi’s drive and energy is fuelled by appreciation for his own donor. A Nigerian woman living in the US had a baby and found out that she could donate the unbilicalcord blood to the public bank. That simple acted to the eventual transplant that would save his life. Due to American regulations, he was unable to meet the woman or child who donated to him, but he says that he hopes, “they hear my story and connect the dots”. Adebiyi is passionate about the benefits of cord blood for African patients and the growing success of these transplants has also made him think about how the opportunity to help patients with cord blood was literally being thrown away. “I know so many mothers whose kids have died because they couldn’t find a stem cell transplant. Just across the Atlantic Ocean, there were millions of cord blood units which are being thrown away as medical waste. It is heartbreaking and so easy to fix,” he says.
His team in Nigeria decided to add setting up a cord blood bank to their efforts – something that the was told by an American medical doctor, “would not happen in her lifetime”. Okoye disagrees, asserting that she believes that a cord blood bank will be
fully functional in the next year. “There are already significant resources in place at the teaching hospital of the College of Medicine [the proposed si te ]. So we feel tha t only modest infrastructure enhancements are needed for a cord blood bank with a minimum of cost,” she says. Adebiyi also believes that the information that the bone marrow registry and cord blood bank holds will allow Nigeria to connect with interna¬tional donors and patients; but he is still realistic about the road ahead. “Nigeria did its first stem cell transplant last year. There are only six doctors who can do it in the country. The US has all the doctors and facilities but not the donors.”
Millions of Africans suffer” from blood disorders which could be successfully treated through transplants that will be available thanks to the fruits of Adebiyi’s team’s efforts. As the registry is public, patients from across the world will also be able to access potential donors. To date, the Bone Marrow Registry has received requests for donor searches for patients from Ghana, Kuwait, Singapore, Nigeria and India, and three potential donors were identified for the Nigerian patients. They are currently undergoing testing to determine their full compatibility.
Bokinni met Adebiyi nearly a year after she learnt that her brother had survived his transplant procedure and was in recovery. “He hugged me and said, ‘You are the closest person I can relate to as a donor since I cannot know mine. It feels like you donated to me’.”
Ocheni emphasises that stem cell donation “is very safe”. Volunteers can choose to donate directly from their bone marrow, or from peripheral blood which is similar to giving blood. New mothers can also agree to donate their child’s cord blood immediately after delivery rather than just throwing it away. “This will lead to double satisfaction for parents – bring a baby into the world, and keep a patient alive,” he suggests.
For Bokinni, donating is the most important thing that you can do. “Saving someone’s life is no kids play! It is a deep and fulfilling act,” she says. “I don’t know what your goal in life is, neither do I know your aspirations, but I want to let you know that I have never felt so much joy in the simple sacrifice of being able to give someone a second chance at life.”
Frederica Baswell is a freelance journalist based in Washington wrote this from Focus on Africa