Seal Cove bridge tenders come in higher than expected

By Craig Westcott

The tender has been awarded for the replacement of Seal Cove bridge, a piece of infrastructure that at times has seemed to have a personality of its own with its claps and bangs and hums with passing traffic that council at various times had to rectify.
The contract, worth some $3.03 million, HST included, was awarded to Brook Construction of Corner Brook at the September 16 public meeting of CBS council.
“The current bridge was actually intended to be a temporary Bailey bridge when it was replaced under an emergency (order) when it was damaged by ice back in the 1990s,” said Ward 4 councillor Melissa Hardy. “We’ve had several repairs and assessments done since then. Now we’re at a state where we’re able to replace it. Work was to begin this (past) summer but as we know the fires took precedence and we have to deal with that and we had to postpone some of the heavy, heavy work that would have been beginning, for the safety of the residents.”
Hardy pointed out there is limited access to some of the roads in Seal Cove and if the main one had been cut off for bridge construction during a period when evacuations and alerts were in place, it could have been detrimental.
“So, it was the right thing we did, as a Town,” Hardy added. “I know some residents may have been unhappy, but we did have a lot of residents reach out and say it was the right thing to do.”
Councillor-at-Large Joshua Barrett said he was excited to see the contract finally awarded. “This has been decades in the making,” he said of the bridge replacement. “I’m sure everybody up in that area will be very pleased with this.”
Mayor Darrin Bent said he too is really pleased to see the contract finally let.
“And to the resident who asked me three months ago if it was actually going to happen this year, and I said yes it would, and they said, ‘I’ll believe it when I see it,’ well I’m sorry,” Bent said,” laughing. “I’ve got to apologize. It’s not going to happen this year, but it is going to happen next year because we’re awarding the tender and the people who got the tender want to get at it.”
Brook Construction was the lowest bidder among four companies vying for the bridge contract. Complete Concrete Solutions of Mount Pearl bid $3.7 million, Coady Construction & Excavating of Torbay bid $3.28 million, and Trident Construction of Mount Pearl bid $3.14 million. All those prices included HST.
Meanwhile, even at $3.03 million, the contract is some $300,000 more than the consultants who designed the specifications for the job, Harbourside Consultants, had estimated. There is a further $99,000 in consultant charges to be added to the total cost. The Town had been approved for some $2.6 million in multi-year capital works funding from the Province to cover the bridge replacement and will make up the difference by using savings from other projects.