On Friday, the year’s World Tunnel Awards were presented by the international tunnel association, ITA. The winner of the Large Project of the Year award (Projects with a budget of over half a billion dollars) was a section of a tunnel project in Los Angeles, USA. The “Purple Line Extension, Section 1” project is the first of three projects to extend the Purple Line from Wilshire / Western Station to Santa Monica, a tunnel project that has been underway for over 60 years.
The project also includes train control and signals, communications, traction power supply and distribution, and fare collection systems.
Rainwater discharge in Tokyo
In the Project of the Year category, where the budget is between 50 and 500 million dollars, the winner was the Japanese Tachiaigawa rainwater discharge project. The project aims to reduce damage from nearby floods while improving the water quality of the water that flows directly into the Katsushima Canal in Tokyo.
Ten-lane tunnel in China
The year’s smaller project, which is projects under 50 million dollars, was won by the Chinese Guanyinyan Tunnel project. The project is an important passage connecting the motorway with city roads. Limited by narrow space, the use of conventional road surfaces, double-arched tunnels, and split tunnels both meet transportation needs and protect the environment. The project is an innovative proposal with a four-arched tunnel of unequal span with two-way ten-lane roadways. Six lanes in the middle lead to the highway and four lanes serve as city roads on both sides.
USA’s largest drilling machine
The Technical Innovation of the Year award went to the largest hard rock tunnel boring machine ever in use in the United States. The tunnel boring machine has a diameter of 11.6 meters and is used for the Mill Creek tunnel project in Dallas, Texas.
