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Strabag tunnels under Toronto to help city deal with downpours

Austria’s Strabag Group has been awarded a C$120m (€80m) contract to build deep concrete shafts, chambers and feeder tunnels for a new wastewater pumping station in the Canadian city of Toronto.

In all, Strabag will build 445m of tunnels and 153m of shafts to help the city manage downpours.

"The pumping station is part of a larger infrastructure programme aimed at increasing wastewater capacity in the event of heavy rain and so improve the water quality of Toronto’s waterways and Lake Ontario," said project manager Simon Köck. 

The shafts and tunnels allow the underground transport of wastewater to the Ashbridges Bay Wastewater Treatment Plant.

The main part of the project involves two large shafts: one 68m deep with a diameter of 27m and another 27m deep with a diameter of 32m. Including five smaller shafts, this results in a total of 153m of shafts to be built.

The shafts will be linked to feeder tunnels with a total length of 445m, with a rock tunnel section as well as a parallel pressure pipe in an open cut close to the surface.

Strabag has been carrying out projects in Canada for 14 years.

It built the Niagara Tunnel, a 10.1km-long water diversion tunnel with a diameter of 14.4m, using one of the world’s largest hard rock tunnel boring machines, noted Strabag chief executive Thomas Birtel.

The tunnelling unit is currently working on a railway tunnel in Toronto which is expected to be completed in 2021.

The company also built the Designer Outlet Center near Vancouver International Airport.

Photograph: Toronto skyline and Lake Ontario (Robert Linsdell/CC BY 2.0) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

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