Some 30 companies/consortiums act together under Dersa’s supervision to manage undertakings well; total price went from R$5.6 billion to R$6.75 billion
Guilherme Azevedo
The construction of the North stretch of Rodoanel Mário Covas (SP-21) is going on at the six lots of the undertaking according to the schedule. The construction started in March 2013 and is expected to be complete within 36 months according to the contractual term, i.e., March 2016. There are 6 thousand workers at the jobsites. The total price of the undertaking, initially contracted for R%5.6 billion, has increased to R$6.75 billion. The price of the constructions was kept at R$3.9 billion, but the amounts to be paid for expropriations, relocations, environmental compensation, projects, supervision, management, communication and complementary construction has increased from R$1.7 billion to R$2.85 billion.
The increase, according to Desenvolvimento Rodoviário S/A (Dersa), the author of the basic project of the undertaking and in charge of managing it, has been due to past and future monetary update (calculated at 6% until 2016) and a higher number of expropriations and relocations.
The North stretch will be 44-km long plus a 3-km long road connection to the International Airport of São Paulo André Franco Montoro, in Guarulhos (in the outskirts of São Paulo). It crosses three municipalities (São Paulo, Guarulhos and Arujá) and connects the West stretch (in operation since 2002, 32-km long) to the East stretch (partially inaugurated last July, which will be 43.5-km long). The South stretch (57-km long) has been in operation since 2010. When the North stretch is ready, Rodoanel will total almost 180-km long.
Under a mobility point of view, the North stretch should attract the traffic that today has to enter the municipality of São Paulo to go to the south of the country. By the way, the road will connect, in a roundabout, with Presidente Dutra Highway (BR-116, the main road connection between São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro) and with Fernão Dias Highway (BR-381, the most important connection on wheels between São Paulo and Belo Horizonte). Initially designed to attract trucks’ traffic, Rodoanel has been consolidating itself as an alternative route for cars riding among regions of São Paulo and municipalities in the metropolitan region. The North stretch will also perform that role.
It is a huge construction work which depends a lot on good management in order to forecast problems and coordinate the several issues involved, such as the environmental and social ones, and to ensure clearance of working fronts, avoiding delays. The drawing of the North stretch mostly crosses densely populated regions, mainly in the north region of São Paulo, which demands extra efforts (and costs).
The execution per se has been distributed in six lots and required the signature of six different contracts. Construction work at lot 1 (6.42-km long) is under the responsibility of Mendes Júnior and Isolux (a subsidiary of Spanish Isolux Corsán); lot 2 (4.88 km) and 3 (3.62 km), of OAS;
lot 4 (9.09 km), of Acciona (whose parent company is in Spain); lot 5 (7.88 km), of Construcap and of Copasa (Spanish parent company); and lot 6 (11.96 km plus access to the airport of Guarulhos), of Acciona.
Including the construction companies, Dersa is working together with 28 companies/consortiums. Many of them contracted to render technical support to manage and supervise the works. There are teams of technical supervision and environment at the jobsites in every one of the lots. There are companies acting in management closer to planning, in issues such as remaining expropriation, relocations, choice of priority fronts, among others involving raising and solving difficulties.
Who explains this way of doing things is Pedro da Silva, Dersa’s engineering director. “We have to manage everything in a concise and synergetic way. Because it does not work to have the project but not the land expropriated. Or to have the land expropriated and the project, but not the environmental license. Or to have the license but not the project or the expropriation. Dersa has developed very well this symbiosis”, advocates that engineer seated at the head of a long wooden desk at his office on the tenth floor of the company’s headquarters in the capital city of São Paulo. Dersa has tried to keep itself fully tied to the construction companies, mentions the engineer, so that it can combine what the project disposes and the need of reviewing routes that come up as the execution advances. Construction work is not something linear, by any means.
With the pioneering experience of Rodoanel, present since the undertaking’s first jobsite was set up in 1998 for the West stretch, Pedro da Silva sees gains in quality stretch after stretch.
One of the main gains is the one he calls the conquest of “environmental and social credibility”. Around the 1990’s there were doubts, for instance, about the promises of environmental and social compensations made by the company. Were they real? Or were they another public phantasy launched to misguide us? Mistrust was mirrored naturally on the deadlines to obtain licenses, quite long ones, and on the strong resistance to relocation by the population reached by the construction work. “We went on gaining credibility along the process”. The result, he stresses, of the respect to environmental rules and effective payment for expropriations and indemnification to dwellers. That is where he is coming when he renders his positive prognostics, smiling: “We will end the construction of the North stretch and people will realize that it has only brought benefits”. Let’s hope so.
Execution
This month (August), according to Dersa, 80% of the project’s area has been expropriated, and the figure almost reaches 100% in some lots. Nearly 3 thousand families have already been transferred (approximately 10 thousand people) and 1.5 thousand families will also be relocated; Dersa offers financial compensation or another real-estate property.
The construction of Rodoanel North uses traditional construction methods, which does not mean absence of complexity. A characteristic of the undertaking stands out as a difficulty: the several tunnels in the route, seven in total, as the less environmentally aggressive choice, which reduces the need of removing vegetation. “The tunnels are the project’s bottleneck because there is no way to advance them”, says Pedro da Silva. According to that engineer, the entrances of six of them have already been cleared, i.e., they have structured openings for excavation to move ahead. Disassembling is done with the help of jumb
os and explosives. The estimated headway daily made is 1.5m, 2m, when on rock; and 0.8m when on soil. The tunnel a little longer than 300 m in Jardim Paraná, in the north region of São Paulo, is the only one that does not have an entrance yet because of difficulties in removing families, according to Dersa. One finding enchants and haunts people: a large wall of rocks, about 30 m high and with 900 inclination right on the path of the tunnel a little over 1 thousand m long at the crest of Serra da Cantareira. A disassembling task very hard to do.
The phone rings in the news room of O Empreiteiro magazine. A woman complains about cracks on her home’s walls after some detonation at Rodoanel North. That is a sign that life has taught us to trust. Will it be a sign that the management of the undertaking should pay attention to possible collateral effects arising from the implementation of an important and model construction work for São Paulo and Brazil? I am sure it is.
Fonte: Revista O Empreiteiro
