THE scheduled opening of the Demerara Harbour Bridge to allow marine traffic to transit may be affected today as a result of a fault that was discovered with the north-eastern, 12- ton hydraulic winch.

This was disclosed by General Manager of the Demerara Harbour Bridge Corporation (DHBC), Rawlston Adams, during a press conference he held on Monday.
The Corporation had over the weekend successfully completed some critical maintenance works which entailed the changing of pontoons. However, it was upon completion, that the fault was discovered.

According to Adams, on Sunday when the winches were being reinstalled it was discovered that one of the four winches was not holding the pressure under the load.
“We suspected that it was the motor and we changed it since we have those spares in stock, we changed the motor and tested it… but later realized that it was the gears in the gearbox that may have gone bad,” he said.
He explained that the motors spin at a very high speed and the bridge has to turn slowly and gearboxes attached to the system are used to synchronize the correct speed.
“This is not something we usually expect, we usually keep in stock motors since this is serviced annually,” he said.

Underscoring that this will affect marine traffic, the general manager said the motor was taken down and sent to Industrial Steel Fabricators (InFab), the team that had installed the hydraulics system when the bridge was refurbished 19 years ago.
“They have a similar winch and we spoke to E C Vieira and they have a similar one, so the intention is to take this one down and use those two and open up the gearbox and hopefully once we identify the problem, we will be able to use one of the gears as replacement for the winch,” Adams explained.
Noting that if all goes well the retraction will proceed as usual, Adams said the extent of the damages within the winch is unknown and a diagnosis on how much it will be the cost to fix or replace cannot be made.

He added that that there will be a meeting with the shipping agents to inform the stakeholders on the position of the marine traffic at the bridge. ( Rabindra Rooplall)
The General Manager said that the vessels carrying fuel, oil, bauxite and sand amongst other commodities will be affected. He said the DHBC usually confine the marine crossing to four vessels per day.