Sebastien Le Belzic, edited by Thibault Nadal
Driving more than 10 kilometers under water on a six-lane highway and twenty meters under the waters of a lake on the outskirts of Shanghai. It is now possible with the inauguration in China of the largest underwater tunnel in the country after four years of work which will have cost several billion euros.
It is a real technological feat that China has just achieved. It inaugurates the longest underwater tunnel in the country. A six-lane highway that passes under Taihu Lake at the gates of Shanghai. Nearly 11 kilometres, 10.79 kilometers to be precise, underwater certainly, it is 3 km less than the Royfast tunnel in Norway, but this one is much wider.
And above all, the work lasted only 4 years thanks to the use of new techniques to seal the tunnel and above all the use of a mechanical monster to dig up to 20 meters deep under the lake. A national pride described by Wang Tongzhou, the president of the company in charge of the site. “This mega machine is the first 16-meter tunnel boring machine designed and manufactured entirely in China, which means that we no longer need to use foreign-made tunnel boring machines to build very large tunnels,” he explained. .
Other huge projects in preparation
And it’s not over since China is currently building a whole series of infrastructures, each more gigantic than the other, such as the longest tunnel in China in the suburbs of Beijing or even creating another even more gigantic underwater tunnel. than that of Shanghai. This time it will be… 123 km under the Boha Sea, whose work is estimated at 32 billion euros.