Work to remove the asbestos from Shaerbeek’s Reyers viaduct staredl on Monday morning and is expected to last until October 23rd. Scaffolding will be put up over the next few days and tarpaulins will then be used to hermetically seal off the area. The job will take half the usual time as the asbestos will be removed by a robot, a first for Bruxelles-Mobilité. Paint containing asbestos will be sucked up using pressure and water and deposited in a separate compartment. A team of 20 people will be on site between 7:00 am and 3:30 pm.
The asbestos removal will take place in 3 stages: Montgomery until August 20th, Diamant until September 10th and Place Meiser until October 23rd.
One direction of the Diamant junction is currently closed to traffic, towards the city centre. Brussels city centre can be accessed from the E40 via the tunnels and there is also a deviation in place via Chaussée de Louvain and Place Meiser. Spokesperson for Bruxelles-Mobilité, Inge Paemen, reassuringly points out that changes in road diretion will be kept to a strict minimum. Things will, however, get more complicated with second stage involving the Diamant junction.
An information session is scheduled for 7:00 pm on Wednesday at the Silver building on Boulevard Reyers. Once the asbestos removal has been completed, the viaduct will be demolished and the area redeveloped until spring 2016.
In summer 2014, renovation work of the viaduct, built in the 1970s, was abandoned, the damage to the structure being deemed too extensive for it to be viable.
(Source: Belga)
