Germany’s Züblin Spezialtiefbau has dispatched 10 of its Liebherr crawler cranes to support an infrastructure project at Egypt’s Suez Canal.
The cranes are facilitating the construction of two road tunnels beneath the canal near the city of Port Said in the north of the country.
The Liebherr fleet supplied by Züblin includes four HS 885 HD units, two HS 875 HD models, an HS 855 HD, an HS 845 HD, an LR 1160, and an HS 8100 HD.
Two work groups have been contracted by the Egyptian armed forces to erect slurry walls with a total surface area of 520,000m2. The first group comprises Züblin and Orascom Construction, while the second is a collaboration between Trevi and an Egyptian construction firm.
The slurry walls are approximately 1.2m wide, and between 20m and 70m deep. The soil consists of approximately 80% clay; sand only accounts for the final 5m to 6m.
The tunnel project is taking place as part of the broader New Suez Canal development, a multibillion-dollar initiative that will allow the waterway to accommodate two directions of shipping traffic simultaneously.
Work on the tunnel’s slurry walls commenced in September 2015. The infrastructure project is scheduled to complete in summer 2017.
