On Tuesday, the Dubai Municipality had revealed their plan and the details regarding the excavation for the  Deep Tunnel Storm Water System for Airport City-Expo 2020 which has been scheduled to begin in December.

This mega tunnel project is the solution to the Emirate that will play as a long time key infrastructure for rainwater drainage in the next 100 years that is to come in the Expo 2020, Al Maktoum Airport area and nearby urban complexes.

The project is being led by  Dawood Abdul Rahman Al Hajiri, director-general of Dubai Municipality. The announcement of the massive drilling works that is yet to come by the end of this year was made after the visit of a delegation to China to inspect the manufacturing of the custom made digging machine that can be used for one of the most important and strategic projects that goes in line with city planning for the Emirate.

The excavation is to happen on December and the project will be covering over an area of 490 sq. Kms – that is nearly 40 percent of the total area of Dubai itself.

Dubai will be purchasing two large Tunnel Boring Machines (TBM) for drilling deep tunnels for the project. These machines are the largest ever in the entire region that shall be used exclusively for digging tunnels to transport storm water. It will be a tunnel of 10 meters in diameter.

Al Hajiri said, “TBM 1 will begin its drilling work from the starting of the seventh intersection on Shaikh Zayed Road for a distance of 2.4 km towards the sea up to the location of the main pumping station, then be dismantled and reassembled to move from the seventh intersection until the eighth intersection along 1.7km. In parallel, the second TBM drilling machine will start work from the Expo intersection on Jebel Ali-Al Lehbab Street for a distance of 5km and will continue until the eighth intersection on Shaikh Zayed Road.”

He also said that, “Manufacturing and installation of one device will take 364,000 man hours. The finished internal diameter of the tunnel will be 10 metres and the cutting diameter of one TBM machine will be 11.05 metres. The average daily drilling will be 19 metres per TBM.”

Further going on to add, “The drilling will be done in two types of soil — the weak rocky soil and clay soil with an average depth of 42 metres. The tunnel with a diameter of 10 metres will consist of eight concrete segments per ring, each 35cm thick. There will be two segment types — 1.6m and 2m wide and each piece will be weighing seven tonnes. These pieces will be fixed by iron pegs and sealed with epoxy (resin).”