Cebu City, Philippines
Trevi Foundations Philippines, Inc. is completing the installation of deep foundations for one of the most important and crucial road projects in the Republic of the Philippines, the Cebu-Cordova Link Expressway (CCLEX), which will directly connect the main industrial area of Cebu City to Mactan International Airport and the new rapidly developing areas of the city of Cordoba.
This project, costing about 500 million US dollars, will completely revolutionize road traffic between the islands of Cebu and Mactan, which are currently connected by two bridges continuously congested by vehicular traffic.
Metro Pacific Tollways Development Corporation (MPTC), in collaboration with the municipalities of Cebu and Cordoba, was awarded the CCLEX contract under the construction and management scheme of the public-private partnership program developed by the Philippine government. MPTC entrusted the construction of the project to its own subsidiary, Cebu-Cordova Link Expressway Corporation (CCLEC), which was created specifically for this development. MPTC’s objective is to halve the actual travel time from the island of Mactan to Cebu and vice versa, so as to attract an initially estimated 40,000 to 50,000 daily users
The development of the project was then contracted out to Cebu Link Joint Venture (CLJV), a temporary association of companies set up by the Spanish company ACCIONA Construction S.A., and the Philippine companies D. M. Consunji, Inc. and First Balfour, Inc. CCLEC combined the services of the Danish COWI A/S as principal consultant with those of the Philippine DCCD Engineering Corporation, as technical consultant to the Client, and with those of Norconsult, a Norwegian consulting firm, which joined the team as an independent consultant.
| Owner |
Metro Pacific Tollways Development Corporation (MPTC) |
| Main Contractor | Cebu Link Joint Venture (Acciona, First Balfour, D.M. Consunji Inc.) |
| Duration of work | 2018 - 2020 |
Project
The Cebu-Cordoba Link Expressway Project (CCLEX) will realize a new motorway, with two lanes in each direction, which will mainly travel over intertidal coral reefs and cross the Mactan Channel via a high cable-stayed bridge (Cebu Bridge) connected to the mainland by long viaducts.
In detail, the CCLEX, starting from the side of Cebu City, will consist of:
• Ramp to be built alongside the existing CSCR viaduct, 640 m long;
• Ramp to be built alongside the existing CSCR viaduct, 628 m long;
• Cebu viaduct, 340 m long;
• Cebu Bridge with five spans, for a total length of 651.5 m and a central span 390 m long;
• Cordoba viaduct, including an 810 m long toll area with 8 lanes in each direction;
• The causeway, which connects the toll area to the Mactan Circumferential Road (MCR), will be about 5,100 m long and will include 4 low-level viaducts: the Cordova Channel Viaduct (180 m), the Cordova-Gabi Pilipog Viaduct (300 m), the Cordova Fishermen’s Viaduct (60 m) and the Cordova-Pilipog Viaduct (60 m).
• The motorway will end with a T-junction with connection to the MCR at Pilipog.
The Cebu Bridge will be a cable-stayed bridge with two central towers reaching a height of +145.00 m above medium sea level, due to restrictions on the authorization of air navigation; and both the central towers and the rear piers will be supported by deep foundations.
Two stainless steel crosses will be attached to the upper part of each tower and allow the anchorage, at the centre of the transversal section of the span, of a flat system of single stays which will be made up of 14 stays on each side of the tower.
The stays will be positioned at a distance of 7.5 m in the rear spans and 12.0 m along the main span.