After three quarters of an hour in a traffic jam, tourists pass the weekly market in Saint- Paul,where merchants vie for the attention of visitors with creole cuisine and spicy ‘carri’ dishes. On the other side of the road, several construction cranes jut out of the steep mountainsides. Harbingers of the Tamarins Route – a 34-kilometer long highway which, beginning in 2009, will relieve some of the pressure on the coastal road. Local and international construction specialists have been working on the six-lane highway between Saint-Paul and L'Étang-Salé since 2003.
Small island, great distances
France and the Region La Réunion will bear most of the estimated €970 million in construction costs, with the rest coming from the European Union. The construction project was awarded in sections. Bilfinger Berger’s Civil division along with Razel, its French subsidiary, undertook complex earth and civil engineering works for the first two construction sections.
The Tamarins Route scales the heights of the west coast, revealing magical views of the Indian Ocean again and again. For the engineers, the route reveals something altogether different: more than 120 deep gorges and rocky cliffs along with dangerous hurricanes and torrential rains that present a special challenge. In two days it can rain as much as it does over two years in Germany and the tropical cyclones bring with them wind speeds of up to 240 kilometers an hour. It was with good reason that the Tamarins Route was named after the native Tamarinde: the tree is the symbol of La Réunion because of its ability to withstand the forces of nature.
“The old national road bridges had no deep foundations”, marvels Peter Dilmann, site manager at Bilfinger Berger. A technology with disastrous consequences: in March 2007, a bridge on the coastal road collapsed. “One of the piles was washed away by heavy rains and the others all collapsed like dominoes”, explains the foundation engineering expert. Luckily, no-one was injured because there is a curfew when such storms rage over the island. The new viaduct has six supporting columns, each up to 45 meters high and anchored up to 33 meters deep into the ground.