The Insane Scale of Europe’s New Mega-Tunnel

this is one of the world's biggest construction projects a 7.5 billion dollar feat of engineering that's going to transform travel across an entire continent and it's happening here on the quiet German island of female let me explain this is the scan-med corridor it's the northern access of the trans-european transport Network and it spans nearly 5 000 kilometers from Malta in the Mediterranean to finland's icy Tundra along the way it drills through Alpine mountains and crosses the sea but follow the route North and something strange happens instead of being able to go straight on to Sweden you have to take this 500 kilometer detour through Denmark and it's all because of this a stretch of water between Germany and Denmark called the female belt so let's just get this straight there's currently a 55 kilometer tunnel being dug through a mountain in Austria there's an epic bridge and tunnel Link in Denmark and Sweden there's another massive Bridge linking two Danish Islands but we can't get over this it might not look like much but this unassuming structure of water has thwarted the plans of the world's best Engineers for decades until now this is one of Europe's largest construction sites it will be the longest the most tunnel in the world no there's no instruction manual for building anything like this the fastest route between Scandinavia and Central I mean the rescue is that people never stop maybe they just pass through what are your concerns with this game they're just trying our nature we're building the Finland belt tunnel between Denmark and Germany you might not heard a female or a tunnel but this is one of the most technologically advanced Mega projects on the planet absolutely enormous like an aircraft hangar in here and it kind of epitomizes the power of construction and its ability to change our world oh wow this is absolutely incredible you get those moments of infrastructure where they nail both the engineering and the architecture and they kind of come together I saw it on the Elizabeth Knight did it really well lovely Railway get the same feeling here I am currently driving over the Harrison Bridge one of the world's most incredible fields of engineering probably one of its best infrastructure projects it's this structure that links to countries it links Denmark and Sweden this is where the whole story starts when this was being planned that Sweden had a big idea [Music] so right now to get from Sweden down into Central Europe we have to catch a train here at Malmo that takes you over the Arizona Crossing to Copenhagen where you have to change onto another train that eventually takes you over to Hamburg and down into Germany even on a high speed train that takes you five and a half hours and for freight trains it's even slower Germany is Sweden's second biggest export market so that's a huge deal the Swedish government saw a shortcut here at the female belts so they said to Denmark will help you build the Arizona bridge if you look into the possibility of a new fixed Link in the waters behind me fortunately that request wasn't as outrageous as you might think so here's Denmark and this is the German island of fimon which gives the femon belt its name now there's been talk of creating a railway between Hamburg and Copenhagen since the 19th century but nothing really happened until the 60s when a bridge was built here that route was then extended to a new ferry port at put Garden bringing trains right up to the water's edge amazingly the trains were then loaded onto ferries and carried over the female belts and on to Denmark the whole thing was pretty slow diesel trains weren't as fast as the ones we have today and the ferry itself took around 45 minutes for years people talked about the idea of a fixed link between these two countries a bridge or a tunnel but it wasn't until Sweden threw down the gauntlet that things got really serious it was way back in 2008 that the Danish and German governments first signed a treaty to start work on the female belt fixed link there was a lot at stake the idea was to replace the ferry with a new permanent Crossing it would have a four-lane Motorway and two Rail lines serving both Freights and high-speed passenger trains and the whole thing would be funded by Denmark who would also collect the 12th bears and run the onshore businesses separately Germany would upgrade the route from put Garden to Lubeck to allow for the new trains and traffic to pass through that would also involve building another much shorter tunnel to the German Mainland here at fiemann's sound it would be a once a generation upgrade of the transport Network the Hamburg to Copenhagen Corridor would be transformed into a high-speed rail and Road Route the swedes would get their shortcut to the continent a massive detour would be wiped off the scammed corridor and that in turn would transform The Wider trans-european transport Network the only thing that stood in the way was the water [Music] the most obvious solution was a bridge this is what they came up with a three kilometer long cable stayed Bridge sitting 65 meters above the water so that ships could still pass underneath it probably reminds you of the urasand bridge and it would have been similar but nearly three times as long and that's where the problems began you see the female belt is awkward from there to there is just under 20 kilometers and that's further than the earth and the bridge had to cross also the depth of the water out there in the Baltic Sea is just over 40 meters and the soil conditions aren't great for building on that all meant the bridge would have needed spans of over 700 meters and nothing like that has ever been built before for a combined Road and rail Bridge the plan was for three huge pylons each just under 300 meters tall the foundations of those would have to be built at Sea in depth for up to 25 meters throw in poor soil conditions and a busy shipping Lane and you have an engineer's idea of hell then as you'll have gathered from my trip on the ferry there's the wind now some of the world's biggest Bridges the errison bridge the Chinook lay bridge in turkey or the Epic Hong Kong Macau Crossing all share a common trait they all more or less run horizontally from east to west a bridge crossing the female would have had to go from north to south meaning that every train truck car and YouTube are trying to make a video would get battered by the prevailing winds blowing from west to east so after careful consideration of the risk to the cost overrun and the technical complexities of construction the bridge was firmly ruled out if you can't go over you've got to go under but it's okay because the theme on Belt is a pretty good place for a broad tunnel [Music] now there's a few reasons why boar tunnels are great first off they don't disturb anything above ground that's why they're usually used for underground Railways in cities but that's also great for a place like fimon which has a delicate ecosystem that could take years to recover from all the disruption caused by building a bridge they are expensive but they become more economical the further you go so the team Returns the possibility of a board tunnel under the female belt but that's who hit a snack board tunnels are dug by a tunnel boring machine or TBM the width depends on the TBM but something like London's new Elizabeth line used machines around 7 meters wide they're good for something like an underground Railway because you have one track per tunnel but FEMA needs a railway Motorway and an access tunnel that could mean boring five tunnels at five times the cost and that's not all [Applause] very little of a train's surface area actually sits on the track and because its wheels are made of steel or at least they are in real life there's very little traction on flat tracks that's great it's one of the reasons why trains are so fast and efficient but going uphill becomes a bit more challenging the average Mainline train can drive upwards by 2.5 percent or one in 40 meaning that for every 40 meters of track the train can move upwards by one meter the FEMA belt tunnel sits 40 meters deep any board tunnel would have to be 10 meters below that and Incredibly long in order for a train to travel into it pass under the ocean and then successfully climb out again the other side a shorter tunnel would create a train track that's incredibly steep and any train probably wouldn't make it so a bridge was too difficult a board tunnel was too expensive things weren't looking good thankfully there was one more option on the table the immersed tube tunnel now I know what you're thinking finally another shot of Fred bells on the beach a freezing cold beach in the Baltic the way this tunnel's built is actually pretty straightforward first of all you create your tunnel segments in a nice dry Factory on the land then instead of digging a deep tunnel underneath the Sleep bed you just dig a trench in the bottom of the seabed then you take your tunnel elements and lay them in one by one sing them together as you go then you cover the whole thing over thank you and hey Presto you've got a tunnel it's a great solution for a place like fimon you don't have to build a bridge where you're going to be subject to the wild weather and the ocean you'd have to dig a deep tunnel which wouldn't really work for a train and shipping lanes above stay open keep driving over the Earth bridge and you suddenly hit a man-made Island and then drop down under the ocean I'm driving under the walls right now this is very very cool this is the drogden tunnel which is itself on IMT this is like a preview of what's going to be built down in Fremont now some people have asked why go through the hassle of building a tunnel than a man-made Island and a bridge up here at the Arizona Crossing and it basically exists because of Copenhagen airport because the restrictions to do with height around that imts are usually used for Fairly short distances like rivers and harbors this is one of the longest imts in the world and it's only four kilometers the femon tunnel will be five times longer making it an immense feat of engineering so how the heck do you build something this big it starts here I'm currently standing in rugby Hound on the Danish side of the female belt and on one of the biggest construction sites in Europe it's all run by the Danish state-owned company theme on as and this place is so big that it's taken them two years just to build the work area the place is a hive of activity there's a village with 1300 workers a specially built Harbor for material deliveries and the northern portal where the tunnel across the surface but the star of the show is easily the massive building behind me this is the factory where the tunnel segments are going to be made it's one of the biggest factories ever built in Denmark altogether covering half a million square meters that's around 200 football pitches these buildings are vast because they need to be the 89 enormous concrete tunnel elements that will be constructed here will each be 220 meters long and 40 meters wide that's so they can fit two Railway tunnels two Motorway tunnels and a service route all side by side building an IMT tunnel under the ocean works like this initially the team constructed a new work Harbor on the coast so that materials could be brought to the site by sea that's enabling them to build these enormous tunnel Factory buildings that'll contain six production halls in total once fully up and running these factories will be on 24 hours a day seven days a week for three and a half years Aggregates and materials will be delivered to the work Harbor and then taken by conveyor belt to the factories in here each of the 89 tunnel elements will be cast but they're so big they're actually formed of nine segments actually it takes 36 hours to pass one segment it has a very very detailed plan like if you are baking in a gnome Advanced cake it has to be the right temperature before you go to the next layer next layer not too much not too cold not too hot not too wet not too dry and then it's in 36 hours they have made one segment and we have to make sure that the concrete are running for all 36 hours once a tunnel element is constructed it'll be rolled out of the factory and taken here to the upper Basin where huge doors will close behind it rather like a lock the Basin will then be flooded ballast tanks will enable the element to float and tugboats will move each element down to the lower Basin and then out to sea they're then taken out here where the trench they're going to sit in is currently being duck now that's the first challenge this project throws up imts normally sit 20 meters deep This is 40 meters once the trench is ready the next step of getting a 73 000 ton concrete tunnel element to the bottom of the ocean isn't too difficult its ballast tanks are simply flooded and gravity does the rest but getting each element into the right place is much harder along the entire 18 kilometer route they have to land within 15 millimeters of their targets to make the whole thing watertight the tunnel elements are fitted with something called a Gina gasket at one end once laid in the trench next to another segment the water is pumped out of the space between the two bulkheads creating a partial vacuum this pulls the two concrete elements together and the junior gasket gets squashed in between them creating a seal once all the elements are in place the trench is backfilled and the tunnel is covered in gravel to protect it at this point nature takes over and eventually covers the gravel bed with sand then there's just a small matter of fitting the whole thing out with lighting ventilation and Motorway and a railway before the whole thing opens in 2029 that's basically it easy right thank you [Music] wow it's absolutely epic the size of it is huge [Music] on paper the process seems logical and practical but seeing it up close you can't help but feel dwarfed by the immense scale of both its ambition and its engineering well this is production hobby which is one of free Productions Hall where we will be casting the tunnel elements for the filter built tunnel this is one is the furthest ahead of the three it's 98 completed the right now as we're entering they're just busy setting up the internal cranes the formworks and all the equipment we need for casting the elements absolutely enormous like an aircraft hangar in here it is you could easily Park a 747 or two in here wow this has actually been pretty fast we've been working on the factory side here what we call the PFA the production facility area for about a year so everything you see here is basically shot up out of nowhere over the last 12 months what keeps these Engineers awake at night is not whether they're foundations and calculations are correct but the sheer Logistics of getting all these tunnel segments built and out to sea in an orchestrated way there isn't anywhere big enough to store them so as soon as they're made they've got to be taken straight out to sea [Music] to make sure nothing stops the production schedule once it started Engineers have been practicing and honing nearly every step of the process I've now got the chance to get up close to a test segment that's been constructed this behind me is just one of the rail tunnels from one end of a tunnel segment and you can see when I'm standing in front of it the immense scale of this project well this is our test bed where we are testing our production method our forms our crews and of course the concrete that we're going to use to cast the tunnel elements what we're actually learning is not not even two real times not one and a half rail tunnel here the actual standard elements will be 42 meters wide but it's big enough for us to experience the scaling issues that are involved in building something like this though there's no instruction manual for building anything like this you know we are we are learning as we go and we've learned a lot about the importance of communication between our crews and the way our concrete behaves over the casting period and we're going to take all that know-how and make a few more minor scale casts before the real deal starts up at the end of the year what's being built here is proof of how construction is constantly learning and evolving 30 years ago when the urison bridge was being planned a tunnel like this wouldn't have been deemed feasible principles of this task construction are the same as any other tunnel from Sweden to Hong Kong but our Knowledge and Skills have now Advanced to a level where we can go deeper and further than ever before when this tunnel completes in 2029 thousands of cars and hundreds of trains are going to pass through it every day and that's going to be a game changer not just for Denmark and Germany but for the wider continents but it all costs a lot of money around 7.5 billion US dollars

a half a billion of that is coming from EU subsidies and the rest is coming from a loan underwritten by the Danish State crucially Danish taxpayers won't have to spend a single penny now the cost of the tunnel is going to be repaid over time by the revenue that comes from tolls on cars it's likely the car is going to be charged about the same as the ferry about 100 euros to use the tunnel and it's projected that Denmark could receive around 4 billion US dollars in profits during the first 50 years of the tunnel's life so improving infrastructure creating green travel corridors and billions of dollars in profits what could possibly be the problem ah [Music] it's not just the theme on belt's geography that this construction team have had to battle campaigners on the German side of the sea have forged tooth and nail for the last decade to prevent the construction of a permanent Crossing I've been coming here as a child it's the most sunniest spot in Germany even if it's a little a little colder than in the in the South it's one of the most sunniest spot in Germany and up to now it's very silently you've got a landscape you've got the free ocean you can go swimming you can do water sports this is the downside of massive construction projects any new Mega scheme has to be built somewhere whether that's in a virgin forest in the middle of a city or on a quiet German Holiday Island whether you like it or not it's going to have a massive impact they're just trying our nature they're just trying the the foundation for our economics and that is trying the foundation for ecologics we have here some people worry about the impact this construction project will have on the unique ecosystem of the female belt the marine life in this area of the Baltic Sea thrives on clear water conditions and the concern is that digging the trench for the tunnel is going to disturb that Ecology of the female bird is very diverse the clouding in the female bed will reduce the growth of macrophytes of Plankton will have of course the repercussions on all living fauna and Marine Flora Simon as say sedimentation is one of the most closely monitored environmental impacts on this project they say they use special dredging machines to minimize The Spill and have Patrol boats and monitoring stations around the dredging site to collect data on water clouding this and other environmental data is published in real time on the Fremont as website in an attempt to improve transparency around the construction but it's not just the Marine environments that Hendrick and Isabel's organization is concerned about a big feature that's been touted with this new tunnel is its ability to kind of create a green link with the continent femon as say that because the distance between Hamburg and Copenhagen is being shortened thousands of vehicles will have to drive 150 kilometers less the new rail service will take cargo off of lorries and put it onto freight trains and the new Rail Link will make taking the train a more attractive option as well as wanting to improve Freight connections the swedes are also very keen to avoid something called flu strike is that right blue strike flu strike and pretty much want to make taking the train easier than flying as much as possible that idea is gaining Traction in April 2022 France banned all internal flights under two hours and other countries are considering doing the same if that's going to catch on then good High-Speed Rail links like this are essential but and this is a big but constructing something as ambitious as the Female Tunnel comes with a huge carbon footprint mostly from the vast amounts of concrete being produced only the fabrication of these concrete tunnel will produce 2 million tons of carbon dioxide female as say that the female belt tunnel is a generational investment in a Greener and climate-friendly transport Corridor in Europe once completed the tunnel will deliver a significant contribution to the green trans-european Traffic Corridor by creating a 160 kilometer shortcut creating a viable alternative to air traffic and shifting goods from trucks to electrified freight trains they added that they're making a concerted effort to reduce the CO2 footprint of construction but that it's not possible to build at this scale without causing some emissions just one of the initiatives Is our commitment to use 100 renewable energy sources for construction and operations of the tunnel Fremont is beautiful and you should keep it like that not changing it into a transport spot [Music] the structure comes into contact with the natural world how couldn't it that doesn't mean that concerns should just be brushed aside it also doesn't mean that we should never build infrastructure ever again what Isabelle expresses are legitimate anxieties from people living on the doorstep of one of Europe's biggest construction projects when there is a good cause for a new Mega project it's important that project teams listen to concerns and work to reduce the impact of their work on people's lives and the environments as far as possible that's something this project has set out to do from the start most of the construction activity is being done on the less populated Danish side of the water and new habitats are being built to compensate for land now occupied by the factory foreign [Music] critics of the fixed link say that the whole project is speculative and that there's no way of definitively confirming whether or not it was worth the money that's true and it's the case with almost every other infrastructure Mega project out there the same was said about the Eurozone bridge and it's now a revered structure that millions of people rely on tourism is a big part of this Island's economy and it could take a hit during construction but in the long run it could benefit from the improved connectivity over the next decade a new route will be tattooed onto this part of the map and for the people who use it its convenience will quickly erase any memory of the enormous effort that it took to make it happen [Music] the bridge behind me is 60 years old and links the other side of fear man with the German Mainland it was vehemently opposed when it was first constructed but now with the construction of another new tunnel under this stretch of water people are concerned for its future they're worried it might fall into disuse or even disrepair that for me is the story of modern infrastructure yes these products are difficult and controversial to realize when they're first constructed but they go on to have a defining impact on all of our lives the new tunnel under the female belt will impact millions of people across this continent over the decades to come any of the controversies around its construction will likely be forgotten and the extraordinary engineering that went in were taken for granted [Music] as always guys if you enjoyed this video and you want to get more from the definitive video channel for construction make sure you subscribe to b1m [Music]

2022-11-28 00:33

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