| Work Detail |
This is the Maragua company, which budgeted a little over $840 million for the execution of the works proposed in the tender document. The provincial government highlighted that the work scheme will benefit more than 5,000 inhabitants of the town of La Emilia through structural measures that will reduce water risk in the area.
As EL NORTE reported, the Ministry of Infrastructure and Public Services of the province of Buenos Aires, through its Undersecretariat of Water Resources, is putting out to tender the work of "Upgrading the Closure Embankment and Operation and Maintenance of the La Emilia Pumping Station" in the District of San Nicolás. This past Wednesday, the envelopes with the proposals and quotes from the companies interested in taking charge of the work were opened in La Plata.
Strictly speaking, it was a single envelope. The only bidder was the firm "Maragua SACIIFYC". There is now a period of evaluation of the offer, from which the award of the work will emerge if the Province decides so. The official budget was about $802 million and the Maragua company quoted the work slightly above that value: a little more than $840 million.
The Ministry headed by Gabriel Katopodis indicated that the works planned in the tender document will benefit more than 5,000 residents of the town of La Emilia through structural measures that will reduce water risk in the area.
Tasks include maintenance of the pumping station, through painting work and minor repairs, as well as operation, preventive and corrective maintenance of electrical panels, gates, submersible electric pumps and generator set.
In addition, the service road will be profiled using a motor grader over the 4.9 km of embankment so that the work can be safely transited. In addition, the accesses to the sewers will be cleaned, widened, unblocked and adapted, and the shoulders and slopes will be profiled using a motor grader.
In this regard, the Undersecretary of Water Resources, Néstor Álvarez, said: “These works are very important since the town of La Emilia has suffered flooding on several occasions and maintaining the hydraulic works is essential for them to continue exercising their function of protecting urban areas.”
The tender document
According to the call for public tender, the work includes an official budget of $801,723,765 and a series of tasks to be developed within a three-year period.
“The main objective of the pumping station is to transfer the city’s excess water when it is not allowed to do so naturally and the floodgates are closed. Its correct operation, as well as the good state of conservation of the embankment, are vital to protect the city from flooding and benefit more than 5,000 people,” was officially detailed in a descriptive report included in the tender document of the bases and conditions defined for the tender.
It is specified there that “the maintenance of the civil work will be carried out at the station through painting and minor repairs.” And that the contracting firm will also be in charge of “the operation and preventive and corrective maintenance of electrical panels, floodgates, submersible electric pumps and generator set.”
«It is also considered necessary to carry out the profiling of the service road above the embankment using a motor grader in such a way that it allows safe transit along the entire length of the contracted work, the cleaning, widening and unblocking and the adaptation of the embankment accesses to the sewers and the profiling of the shoulders and slopes with a motor grader», the document states, while the contractual obligation to carry out raising work on the embankment, which is close to 5 kilometres long, is also prescribed.
In fact, these will be the first works to be carried out during the three-year period of the contract resulting from the tender. “There are sections of the embankment whose height and width at the crest are lower than those required. For this reason, the embankment will be raised […]. The execution of all the tasks in this article must be carried out during the first 6 months from the date of the Commencement of Works Act,” reads the documentation attached to the call for tender.
The bidding
for La Emilia was a topic that the head of the Buenos Aires government, Carlos Bianco, referred to last Monday.
Bianco confirmed: “The restoration of the closure, operation and maintenance embankment of the La Emilia Pumping Station, for an amount of 800 million pesos, is a work that will prevent flooding from occurring as has occasionally happened in that town.”
On March 13, La Emilia once again suffered the historic and cyclical anxiety caused by the alert for a possible new overflow of the Arroyo del Medio and a possible new flood. Fortunately, that did not happen, but it did put into review the sufficiency (or not) of the preventive mechanisms established after the historic overflow of January 2017. |
