Under a bilateral agreement, Spain and Morocco, through their respective agencies SNED and SECEG, are jointly studying the feasibility of a fixed link across the Gibraltar Strait, presently envisaged as an undersea railway tunnel.
The United Nations, through a number of resolutions of their Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), have invited relevant organisations affiliated with the UN system to participate in the studies. The International Tunnelling Association (ITA) being in consultative status with ECOSOC has been directly asked to cooperate with the two government organisations SECEG and SNED. So far, such cooperation has mainly resulted in the joint sponsorship by UN and ITA of a number of international events dealing with selected technical subjects of interest both to the Gibraltar Strait tunnel project and to the tunnel engineering community.
The series of events held so far under that cooperation started with the Open Session on the Gibraltar Strait Crossing which was included in the Tunnel Congress of April 1994 in Cairo. There, the project was generally presented and a number of papers related with the main aspects of its feasibility were contributed and discussed. The proceedings of that Open Session are available.
The second of these events was the workshop devoted to “Characterisation of Tunnel Boring Machines for tunnelling flysches”, which was held in Tarifa, Spain, on February, 1997, with approximately 35 special invited guests from 11 countries. The participation included the Economic Commission for Europe of the UN, several representatives of the two government organisations, a number of ITA Executive Council members and international experts, as well as representatives of TBM manufacturers. The proceedings of the Tarifa Workshop are also available.
The third UN/ITA sponsored event was held in Vienna, Austria, in April, 1997, on the occasion of the 23rd General Assembly of ITA, The meeting was devoted to the exploration of the topic “Methodology to establish the construction costs of tunnels bored with TBMs” and proved the need for further, deeper discussion on this vast subject in a next, larger seminar similar to the Tarifa Workshop. The Vienna meeting was certainly a major preparatory step to the present workshop, in the sense that it guided largely the design of the latter.
ITA Executive Council
SÓCIOS COLETIVOS
