Indonesia’s longest bridge to be completed in March-April 2009
JAKARTA, June 14 (Xinhua) — The construction of the Suramadu (Surabaya-Madura) bridge in Indonesia - which will be the longest one in the country - is now 82 percent completed and is expected to be ready for use in March or April 2009, a public works official said.
Costing a total of 4.528 trillion rupiah (about 503 million U.S. dollars) and building jointly by Chinese and Indonesian companies, the bridge will be almost 5.5 km long and span a narrow channel between East Java’s provincial capital of Surabaya and Madura island.
The project is now in a critical phase in which the part being built from the Surabaya side would be joined with the part being set up from the Madura side, Antara news agency on Saturday quoted Hediyanto Huseini, director of roads and bridges for western Indonesia at the public works ministry, as saying.
He said its budget would need an additional 19.84 million U.S. dollars for the building of a museum on the bridge’s construction, monitoring posts and a comprehensive lighting system.
The lighting system was necessary to accentuate the giant bridge as a marine tourist landmark at night time, Huseini said.
After completion, the bridge would be managed like a toll road which the public could use by paying a fee which would be kept as low as possible as the bridge was not an investment but a public facility, he said.
Editor: Du Guodong
Source: http://news.xinhuanet.com/
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