Highway to palm paradise

Thousands of tonnes of prestressed concrete strand from Scaw’s Wire and Strand factory in South Africa support the concrete network of the Jumeirah Palm Island Road Corridor and Access Project in Dubai (left). The new road network will aid the free flow of traffic from the city to the Dubai Marina area and Jumeirah Palm Island, the famous, man-made, palm tree-shaped resort island with 120 kilometres of sandy beaches . Visible from the moom, Palm Island was created using land reclamation by Nakheel, a company owned by the Dubai government.

It is able to support a population of approximately 500 000 people and includes shopping complexes, 2 000 villas, luxury hotels and Dubai’s first marine park. In addition to the widening of lanes on either side of the Sheikh Zayed Road (a major connecting route), the new network included the development of two interchanges, bridges and tunnels at a cost of Dhs611-million (approximately R1,524-billion).

Scaw product is being used on an ongoing basis in other important development projects in the United Arab Emirates, projects both related and unrelated to this one.