INDIA. Mumbai: The longest Orthotropic Steel Deck (OSD) span of 180 metres of the Mumbai Trans Harbour Link (MTHL), India’s longest sea bridge connecting Sewri (Central Mumbai) with Nhava Sheva (Navi Mumbai), was successfully launched on Wednesday in the presence of Maharashtra Chief Minister Eknath Shinde and Deputy CM Devendra Fadnavis.
Out of the 70 OSD spans, 36 OSD spans have already been installed. According to a CMO statement, MTHL will reduce travel time between South Mumbai and Chirle in Navi Mumbai to 15 to 20 minutes.
OSDs are created in 12 m-long panels and sent by sea to the assembly yard at Karanja Port in India from countries like Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, and Myanmar.
They are put together to create full-length spans, or “large blocks,” which can be anywhere from 65 and 180 metres long. Once ready, these spans are transferred to the erection site by being placed onto barges at Karanja Jetty.
The MTHL is a 6-lane road bridge across Mumbai Bay between Sewri and Chirle. The total bridge is about 22 km in length, comprising 16.5 km of sea bridge and 5.5 km of viaducts on land on both ends of the bridge. The link has interchanges at Sewri and Shivaji Nagar with National Highway 4B and Chirle.
MTHL is divided into three construction packages for execution, of which Package-II is awarded to Daewoo E&C and Tata Projects Ltd. It has a 7.8 km bridge section that spans the Mumbai Bay and the Shivaji Nagar Interchange.
The Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA) is implementing the ambitious project in three packages containing civil works. Package I contains the Intelligent Transport System (ITS). 90 percent of the civil work is completed.
The MTNL package is broadly divided into III zones: marine, which is about 4.37 km; intertidal, which is about 2.09 km; and land, which is about 1.35 km. In the land zone, six ramps connect the bridge with the proposed CIDCO Coastal Road.
“The bridge structure is mainly segmental box girder concrete decks of mostly 60-meter spans in all the zones except for a navigational section, which is steel deck, OSD. These spans are installed to ensure the smooth passage of the ships under them since they provide a height clearance of nearly 25 meters from the water level and hence these zones are known as the navigational sections,” the press release read.
Shinde and Fadnavis, along with other ministers- Dadaji Bhuse and Sanjay Rathod visited the MTHL project. Metropolitan Commissioner SVR Srinivas and MMRDA officials were also present during their visit.
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