By Issah Mohammed
Accra, April 20, GNA – Mr Kwasi Amoako Attah, the Minister of Roads and Highways, says vehicles that exceed the legal height limit of 4.5 metres will be sanctioned and denied access to the Accra-Tema Motorway.
This is to allow for the construction of a 22-meter bridge over the Tema Motorway, expected to begin next month.
The construction, which forms part of the flyover project from the Flowerpot roundabout, will be completed in five months.
The Minister said he would be seeking the assistance of the Inspector General of Police (IGP) to strictly enforce the height limit of trucks on the Motorway.
Mr Amoako Attah urged the contractors to take proactive steps to ensure the traffic situation on the Motorway was well managed during the construction to reduce loss of productive time in traffic.
Mr Emmanuel Dogbotse, the Resident Engineer, said the engineers were working hard to minimise the impact of the construction on economic activities adding that “we will try to work day and night so that the time for construction can be reduced from four and half to maybe three months”.
“We have four stages of traffic control and seven stages of construction. In our first traffic control, we will maintain the original lanes and we will do stage one construction.
“In the next traffic control, we will do stage two and stage three construction and we will put the Motorway road through the median of the Motorway. We will still maintain our two lanes in and two lanes out, ” he said.
He said the contractors would be mounting gentries on each side of the road to prevent vehicles with heights exceeding the legal limits from passing through the construction site.
“The law says 4.5 but most of the truck on the motorway are more than 4.5 metres but we will allow up to 4.8 because our clear height limit is 5.2 meters, ” he said.
The flyover project consists of one mainline bridge of 802 metres, two ramp bridges, four auxiliary roads of 2.5 kilometres and ancillary works.
It will involve creating an access route from the Motorway to the Boundary Road roundabout and an exit into Cantonments from the Giffard Road interchange.
The project, which originally started in March 2017, has a revised completion date of Dec 31, 2023, from March 16 2019, and an intended final take over period of December 31, 2024.
The revised contract sum for the project is GH₵284.6 million according to the Ministry.
GNA