Eko Atlantic City devt achieves more milestones with new bridges

After two years of intensive and extensive work on infrastructure development, Eko Atlantic City has announced the completion of 14 new bridges that stretch five million square metres, representing half of the entire planned city development. Altogether, the 14 bridges provide 42 lanes.

The bridges are new additions to earlier milestones in infrastructure development in the city which had seen the development of the 8-lane Eko Boulevard, and the provision of street lights running the entire stretch of the city’s Marina District and foreshadowing the Eldorado that is in the making.

Eko Atlantic, a city rising off reclaimed land on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean in Lagos and touted as the largest and most comprehensive mixed-use city development in West Africa is modeled after the Skyscraper District of Manhattan Island in New York City. It promises commercial, residential, entertainment and leisure activities that will make it a 24/7 lively environment.

On completion, the new city will be home to about 450,000 residents with commuter volume expected to exceed 300,000 people daily. Self-sufficient and sustainable, the city boasts state-of-the-art urban design with its own power, clean water, advanced telecommunications, spacious roads and 110,000 trees.

The uniqueness of this initiative is that the residential units will be constructed as vertical high-rise apartment towers to maximize its limited space. A recent data from Residential Auctions Company (RAC) shows there are already over 1,000 apartment units of various room sizes ranging from one bedroom to four bedroom penthouses under construction.

The city is divided into 8 districts including Harbour Lights, Business Districts, Eko Drive, Marina, Ocean Front and Avenues and the new bridges are meant to connect these districts and make them accessible by road. The bridgework has formed a major element of the development and has also enabled all major avenues to overpass the canal system running through the spine of the project.

The bridges were built with 2-6 lanes. Bridge 7, for instance, comprises a 6-lane carriageway and is located on Avenue 1, thus defining the western boundary of the Business District which is the commercial heartland of the city.

Spanning 52 metres overall in three sections, Bridge 7 is typical of the design used in all the bridges and comprises a reinforced concrete cast in-situ deck with concrete piers and abutments.

Also post-tensioning techniques were employed on the horizontal deck to achieve the span required.

Eko Atlantic is planned to be a self-sufficient and self-sustaining city in terms of infrastructure and what has been seen so far is demonstration of the developers resolve to achieve that aim.

“We are fully committed to ensuring that the project is completed on schedule”, assures David Frame, Managing Director, South Energyx Nigeria Limited (SENL)—the developers and promoters of the city.

Frame notes that with the successful completion of all the bridges, all the major avenues within Phases 1 and 2 of the City are now fully interconnected, with the comprehensive road network of the city defined and all zones accessible.

At the onset of this city development, it was projected that by 2016, people would start living in the city. Though that projection did not materialize, it is the credit of the developers that a building—one of the Eko Pearl Towers is standing there completed and ready for occupation.

The Towers, a residential building in the Marina District of the city was completed and commissioned in November last year by the Lagos State governor, Akinwunmi Ambode, and that was done just a few months after the commissioning of the Boulevard regarded as Nigeria’s first 8-lane city road.