Riga’s New Promenade Faces Costly Repairs After Just Months of Opening
The construction of the Rīga Mūkusalas promenade, costing 20.8 million euros, was completed with such poor quality that a similar amount will soon be needed to prevent the new structure from collapsing into the Daugava River.
Construction of the promenade began at the conclude of 2023 and lasted two years, completing on December 22, 2025, meeting the deadline stipulated in the loan agreement between the municipality and the Latvian state. The official opening to the public was on January 9th of this year. However, the joy of the new construction lasted only until the winter gave way to meteorological spring. At that point, “the foundation subsided along with the snow and ice,” as Mārtiņš Slimbahs, head of the Public Infrastructure Development Administration of the External Space and Mobility Department of the Riga City Council, stated at the Riga City Council’s Traffic and Transport Affairs Committee meeting on Monday, March 23rd. He was identified as the main project implementation supervisor and organizer, as far as those duties relate to the client. The crumbling of the “foundation” – not often a specifically noted construction element – is indeed one of the most easily noticeable defects in the recently completed structure. Unfortunately, this defect serves as a signal not only to look for, but also to find many other defects.
What the “Foundation” Is and Why Its Crumbling Is a Problem
The foundation of the promenade is a reinforced concrete strip approximately 20 cm high and wide and about a kilometer long. The strip rises above the sidewalk, and railings are screwed to it between the promenade and the river. But what now, when the foundation is visibly crumbling? The metal railings turn out to be screwed into a material that may be only slightly harder, or perhaps even softer, than hard cheese. In any case, it is easier to poke a hole in that cheese with your finger than to do so in the concrete in many places.
The foundation would not attract attention if the visible collapse were the only defect. However, the concrete has crumbled in long stretches, and the hole in the concrete surface confirms not only damage, but also malicious intent. Specifically, the crumbling concrete has been concealed by covering it with a layer of patching compound – or perhaps some other modern material – as evidenced by the impressions of the putty knife. And that is worse than just the concrete crumbling, because concealing defects is a deliberate act, for which one cannot claim ignorance of receiving substandard concrete or hoping to rush the concreting before the frost, which arrived three days earlier than meteorologists predicted. The patching was done because the builders knew about the defects, and the failure to notice them suggests that the construction supervisor and the client either did not set foot on the site, or only visited to look at the city towers, but never looked at what was under their feet.
The parties involved in this construction are as follows: the construction work was carried out by SIA “Tilts,” whose owners and board members are Sergejs and Artjoms Gridņevs. They were supervised by SIA “Geo Consultants,” owned by Jānis Ābeltiņš. The construction was designed by SIA “BM-projekts,” with Anete Baltā listed as the beneficiary in the Enterprise Register.
The Concrete Layers Resemble a Cabbage Head
The crumbling of the foundation is not the only reason to avoid leaning against the metal railings. The concrete strip not only crumbles, but also bends in the vertical plane like soft, not hard, cheese. There are two explanations for this fact, which do not exclude, but complement each other. First, that the construction company “Tilts,” i.e., the subcontractors hired by “Tilts,” the subcontractors of the subcontractors, etc., down to the construction worker who actually did something regardless of his skills or lack thereof, do not know how to use a level. Second, that the soft strip has bent along with the bank reinforcement wall resting on the bottom of the Daugava. If so, this bending will continue with unpredictable consequences at any moment.
To screw the industrially manufactured, i.e., made from truly rectangular sections, railings onto such a bent strip, patches of varying thickness were placed above the strip. The image combines such a patch in the vertical plane with an extension of the foundation that was later glued to a monolithic pour to reach the turning point of the strip. Such a construction signals that either “Tilts” does not use a meter stick, or that the incorrect strip length was indicated by “BM-projekts,” which also received some criticism at the committee meeting on March 23rd. As expected in such cases, the adhesion between the base strip and the patch is close to zero, so the joint is smeared with yet another type of mortar.
There is no reason to rely on the adhesion between the strip and the patches above it. The metal railings now hold the foundation more than the foundation holds the railings. What we have is even more true for the patches that the railings are pressing against the strip. However, there are places where the patches have already been squeezed out of the structure and the railings are hanging in the air.
The structure is still considered salvageable, by re-concreting the foundation with mortar, in which enough cement will be added. The softness of the current concrete will be turned from a defect into a feature, so that the concrete can be chipped away from the foundation without damaging the upper ends of the reinforcement bars embedded in the structure. These will ensure adhesion between the new concrete foundation and the overall structure.
Stone Blocks Hanging in the Air
The foundation is as suspicious as the part of the promenade where the builders did not need to use their own concrete, as the railings are attached to the old stone blocks inherited from the former bank reinforcements. However, nothing is connected or secured in that section of the promenade either.
The old block section is divided into several sections from the point of view of building structure formation. If anything can be believed, then the section between the Stone Bridge and the Iron Bridge is reinforced with new reinforcements. Further towards the Salu Bridge, the old reinforcements were used, without taking into account their subsidence towards the river, as it was claimed that such subsidence had not increased since 2018, when research began on the then truly dilapidated bank restoration. Deputies warned that the bank reconstruction could disrupt the stability of the reinforcements that had settled in the most stable way over decades. Officials agreed and promised to install monitors to promptly detect changes in the bank’s inclination.
However, even the current inclination is enough for the railings and stone blocks to collapse into the Daugava, as they are simply placed on the bank reinforcement. Mortar has been applied in between, but its binding ability is no greater than that of wet sand. As soon as this mortar dries, it turns to dust and rises into the air. Accordingly, the stone blocks hang in the air.
The Mūkusalas promenade demonstrates the degradation of all participants in the construction process, when compared to what was built recently with how castles were built in the Middle Ages. Although most of them were destroyed during the Great Northern War (1700-1721), large field stones up to the height of two or three-story houses can still be seen in the ruins of their walls, despite the rain having washed them for centuries without a roof, and the frost having eroded them. These walls demonstrate that, in principle, it is possible to bind field stones with mortar. Some of this skill even survived until the construction of the Stone Bridge around 1955. The level of construction at that time is evidenced by the imprint of the wood grain of the board used as a formwork on the Stone Bridge ramp. This is what concrete should be like, from which dust has been eroded in microns over 70 years, with all the harsh winters, long rains, strong winds, and – most importantly – the vibrations caused by cars and trams.
At the meeting on March 23rd, Deputy Artūrs Klēbahs noted that he had seen traces of recent construction work on the promenade, but not construction work or builders. Kristaps Kauliņš, Director of the External Space and Mobility Department, stated that this could not be the case, as the builder had applied for the promenade repair later, when the building season would begin with the stabilization of temperatures in Latvia. However, the work is already underway and the bank is changing, so the photo shoots published here are dated March 22nd. It is bad that the builders did not come to the committee meeting of the council and therefore could not explain what has changed – how they will manage to do what they could not do in the two building seasons of 2024 and 2025 in a couple of months, but now even in a couple of nights. Let them succeed, but the result can only be judged when the newly tidied up building elements have withstood rainstorms, frost and heat.
The question of Deputy Chairman of the Traffic and Transport Affairs Committee, Ansis Pūpols, whether “Tilts” will really be left in the construction association to which almost 100 million euros have been promised for the reconstruction of the Vanšu Bridge, is understandable. However, the reluctance of officials to change construction companies is equally understandable, as there is no guarantee of replacing them with more skilled builders.