Fehmarnbelt Tunnel

This blog post will pick up the underwater construction process where the last blog post left off. In the previous blog I explained how the trench was dredged, the element immersed and afterwards joined with the previously installed element; The bulkheads between the elements being removed to complete the operation.

In 2014 the construction of the Fehmarn tunnel will commence. This post will describe how a tunnel, consisting of 79 standard elements and 10 special elements, will be immersed and assembled under water.

Immersed tube tunnelling is an efficient engineering solution for the Fehmarnbelt Fixed Link. An immersed tunnel is an underwater tunnel composed of segments, constructed elsewhere and then floated to the tunnel alignment to be sunk into place and then linked together.  

I apologize for the blog being a bit quiet during the last month, but things have been rather hectic as the project is entering a new phase. The 1st of June Wim Janssen (project manager from TEC in Holland) retired and Klavs Munch Koefoed (Rambøll) replaced him.

The overall risk objective of the Fehmarnbelt tunnel is that it must be at least as safe to drive through the tunnel as it is driving on a highway in an open countryside. The tunnel has therefore been designed and has been given the status of an ordinary highway.

You might never have heard of it, but some people (very few – 1-3% of the population) suffer from “tunnel phobia”. Tunnel anxiety/”tunnel phobia” is a broad popular term for a feeling that varies from real phobia