Toulouse. Gramont shopping center: what is this silo parking project that has been going on for two years?
Through Guillaume Laurens
Published on
It is barely ten years old and is already the subject of a titanic project … Since 2019, the silo car park of Gramont, a Toulouse, which welcomes customers from Auchan and the shops of the shopping mall, has seen dozens of support pylons erected, surrounded by wooden palisades. On the ground floor, but also on the first floor. But why is this project taking so long? What does this work consist of? And what is the nature of the risk?
“Insufficient stiffness” according to management
It was in 2019 that the appearance of “Microcracks” was observed on the slabs of the parking lot, relates Eric Boucher, director of the Gramont shopping center. The work, out of the ground in December 2011, was still under a ten-year guarantee. The owner therefore operated his insurance, deploring a “Insufficient stiffness of the floors”, in the words of the director, who feared “premature aging of the work”.
According to construction workers negotiated on the site, the problem would find its source in the very design of the work: Eiffage, the builder, installed a slab here which, since its creation, did not have beams to support the structure. Hence the cracks.
Floor towers between each seat
“The floor was too flexible,” summed up Eric Boucher, who refuses to talk about sagging, and even less risk of collapse. However, as a precautionary measure, the management of the shopping center had it installed in 2019 “Shoring towers between each of the parking spaces on the ground floor, as well as on the first floor, ”explains the director.
The site seems to drag on for the regulars of Gramont, but the time that the insurance companies do their work, and that the work authorizations must be issued by the town hall, the work could not really begin until February 2021.
250 beams to add
Since that date, the workers have been working on “repairing” the structure. In order to “strengthen the structure”, they proceed to the installation of 250 reinforced concrete beams under the existing slabs, on two levels. Part of the first floor has already been completed (see image below), the rest should be soon, before tackling the ground floor, where customers of the hypermarket can still park today.
“No risk” according to management
The management wants to be reassuring: there is ” no risk “, she argues, to park in this parking lot. But in this area served by the metro, where parking spaces are still taken, users of the Gramont shopping center, one of the largest in the Toulouse metropolitan area, will still have to take their troubles patiently, to fully enjoy 1,200 parking spaces (out of the 3,000 in total for the shopping center): the work should continue until the end of 2022.
Other work in progress
Also to know that the management of Gramont, which also leads a vast modernization plan exterior and interior of the shopping center for 13 million euros, take advantage of this unforeseen project to carry out other work on the silo parking lot. On the program: repairing the waterproofing of the second floor (below), but also the upcoming installation of a guidance system instead, to allow motorists to more easily locate available locations.
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