Grupo Gilbert Estructuras wins Texcoco airport's steel bidding

The firm Grupo Gilbert Estructuras en Acero won the bidding for the disposal of the steel of the canceled project for the Mexico City’s New International Airport in Texcoco with an offer of MXN $4,030 per ton.

In a statement, Mexico’s Communications and Transports Ministry (SCT) informed that Mexico City’s Airport Group (GACM) issued the ruling on the bidding for the purchase of steel A500 grade B, grade 50, A572 grade 50, and API 5L X52 PSL.

The GACM received 13 bids and the one from Grupo Gilbert Estructuras en Acero S.A. de C.V. “fulfilled all the requirements established in the call and provided the best conditions for the Mexican State, in terms of the Constitution’s Article 134.”

The company will be in charge of dismantling the Control Tower (the central structure up to the current floor level) and will collect and weigh the materials in the specified area.

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It will also be in charge of dismantling a tubular structure and a structural steel frame and it will collect, weigh, and remove the materials in the specified area; this includes cutting steel anchors and rods that are anchored to the concrete slab.

It will also install a portable electronic truck scale in the specified area, including operation costs, weighing, and removal of the material as well as the cleaning and removal of the machinery and the equipment.

The cost of a canceled airport

Last year, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said that all the companies involved in the construction of the part-built MXN $75 billion Mexico City airport he canceled in late October had been paid off.

López Obrador scrapped the airport on the grounds it was riddled with corruption and was geologically unsound.

The paid amount included roughly MXN $60 billion for finished works, and almost MXN $15 billion for non-recoverable expenses.

This settled the 692 contracts that different construction companies had won to perform the project best known as Mexico’s New International Airport (NAIM).

The Communications and Transports minister Javier Jiménez Espriú said back then that the 11 biggest works, such as the terminal building, the landing strips 2, 3, and 6, the control tower, the slab of the terminal building, and the intermodal center, which represented 77% of the contracted amount, were settled with nearly MXN $10 billion; this because these works had already been paid MXN $35 million.

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Besides, as a consequence of the cancelation of the building of Texcoco’s Airport , 140,000 tonnes of iron and several cubic meters of tezontle and basalt were left, as well as work equipment, which will be sold to recover MXN $4 billion.

The head of the Communication and Transport Ministry added that as soon as all materials are taken away and the “amparos” are solved, they could give the land to start the construction of an ecologic park.

Rescuing Lake Texcoco

After the cancellation of the New International Airport of Mexico (NAIM), the National Water Commission (Conagua) will spend MXN $221 million in 44 feasibility studies for the “rehabilitation and rescue of the Lake Texcoco.”

The objective is to develop actions that answer to the needs of the activities of restoration and environmental preservation in the federal area of Lake Texcoco, as well as taking care of the lakes Nabor Carrillo and Recreativo, according to information to which EL UNIVERSAL had access.

Conagua insists that “with the works for the construction of the NAIM, the Lake Texcoco area was highly affected by drainage, with the objective to perform activities for the installation of the infrastructure of the terminal, the control tower, landing strips, and roads, drastically changing the original hydraulic and environmental conditions.”

The management of Conagua's Lake Texcoco Ecologic Park highlights that the new airport was canceled by the end of 2018, and in its place, it was decided to build, along with the federal area, the Lake Texcoco Ecologic Project, a world-scale metropolitan park.

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