Tunnels

Challenge

As infrastructure ages, it must be upgraded to address deterioration and ensure it has the strength and capacity to serve a growing population.

Well-designed and configured passenger rail systems improve quality-of-life for communities throughout the world. These systems also reduce commuter traffic, helping to curb greenhouse gas emissions. Tunnels are an integral part of these systems, and their proper design is imperative to the success of passenger rail systems in city cores. Delivering complex tunnel infrastructures in a cost-effective and timely manner is a must to satisfy multiple stakeholders.

Many older cities rely on combined sewers to handle both sanitary and wet-weather flows. As development reduces the ground's ability to absorb rainfall, stormwater runoff becomes an ever-increasing problem. During heavy rainfall, system capacities can easily be exceeded. Combined sewer overflows can occur, requiring complex and costly system improvements.

Today, urban construction needs more sophisticated techniques to address all these problems, and to avoid surface disturbance, traffic and land use impacts, and costly utility relocations.

We work with clients all over the world to address issues just like these, bringing our considerable, successful, tunnel-engineering experience, combined with skills in hydraulics, geotechnics, hydrogeology, tunnel design, odor control, corrosion control, and more.

Capabilities

Rail & transit

In urban centers and airports, the underground builds of transit systems must be planned to minimize surface disruption throughout the construction process. We provide the geotechnical, structural, and tunneling skills you need, and complement them with track design, signaling, communications, traction power, ventilation and emergency egress, rail activation, and systems commissioning.

Roadway tunnels

As highway infrastructure expands around the world, the need for large-diameter and large-bore tunnels grows. With our comprehensive civil, structural, and transportation engineering expertise, we bring critical knowledge and experience to the early stages of these visible, long-term projects. Whether it's a highway realignment through a rural canyon, a river crossing, or a route beneath a congested urban center, we have the experience and construction technologies to help.

Pedestrian tunnels

Underground occupied spaces require a truly integrated, multidisciplinary approach to provide a safe, accessible, and pleasant user experience. Our tunneling strengths are complemented by our in-house capabilities in the architectural, mechanical, electrical, and fire-life safety disciplines, allowing us to provide a fully-integrated service.

Water tunnels

Globally, water supply and distribution systems must remain operational for extended periods of time. Yet they need constant repair, upgrading, and expansion. We're experienced in the replacement of water conveyance systems, from small-diameter pipelines using horizontal direction drilling, to some of the largest and longest machine-bored tunnels.

Wastewater tunnels

Combined and sanitary sewage overflows need complex and often costly system improvements. Hard surfaces like city streets reduce the ground’s ability to absorb rainfall, so stormwater runoff becomes an increasing problem. We provide the right blend of tunnel, shaft, and hydraulic-system-design expertise to find solutions to the most complex wastewater and stormwater conveyance and storage needs.

Trenchless technologies

This family of techniques for smaller-diameter, underground-infrastructure implementation allows renovation, replacement, and new construction with minimal excavation from the ground surface. The advantages are tremendous for constructing and rehabilitating water, wastewater, energy, communications, and industrial infrastructure while minimizing public inconvenience and traffic disruption.

Blogs

Funding what tomorrow’s cities should be

George D. Thomas

Columbus, Ohio was the big winner in the US Department of Transportation (USDOT) Smart City Challenge. Its proposal received US$50 million for first-mile/last-mile solutions to its transit challenges and struck a lot of the right chords, especially its aim to reduce infant mortality rates in some communities by 40 percent. How? By creating smart city corridors and smart payment projects that will make transit more available in underserved neighborhoods. That way, residents’ access to prenatal care would improve.

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