£1bn 80km tunnel link to France ‘absolutely doable’
Three Scandinavian experts all believe a £1bn 80km tunnel linking Guernsey, Jersey and France is perfectly feasible to build.
‘Is it doable, I believe it is, there is no magic involved whatsoever.
‘We need investigations to make it reality, but it is absolutely doable,’ said Eivind Grov, chief scientist at research company Sintef, pictured, who has worked on tunnels projects from Iceland to the Russian Baltic.
The three tunnel engineering specialists were speaking at a sold-out lunch at the OGH organised by the Chamber Of Commerce.
Listen: Simon De La Rue was joined by one of the co-founders of the Connect 3 Million project, Martyn Dorey, JT chair Meriel Lenfestey and Jersey business expert Kevin Keen to explore the idea on the new Business Brief podcast
Attendees included the Lt-Governor and a number of deputies and senior civil servants.
A poll taken before the talk showed that 95% of the audience were in favour of a tunnel.
Two hours later, at the end of the talk, this had risen to almost 100%.
Mr Grov said people in Iceland in the 1990s thought a 5km undersea tunnel he was working on would be an ‘engineering fiasco’.
‘But people got on board. It was built between 1994 and 1998 and now it is seen as a huge success.’
Arild P Sovik, network director at the Norwegian Tunnelling Society, said that in Norway there were now 50 car tunnels under construction and another 150 in planning.
He said the Norwegian attitude to tunnels had become ingrained in the country’s culture.
‘We are even building a shipping tunnel to avoid a difficult coastal area. It’s 1.7km long, 50m wide and 30m high. That is how normal it is for us to think “tunnel”, he said.
He was currently working on a project to build a 26.5km long ‘double tube’ road tunnel connecting a Norwegian island.
‘We have already made all the mistakes, and we have all the regulations and procedures in place to help the Channel Islands,’ he said.
Teitur Samuelsen, CEO of Eystur-og Sandoyartunlar, the Faroe Islands government-owned tunnel corporation, has worked on four sub-sea car tunnels. He believed the geology of the Manche region should make a tunnel viable, but agreed that the biggest hurdle the project would face was not geology or engineering, but politics.
‘The tunnels we have built in the Faroes all connect islands of the same jurisdiction,’ he said.
‘But I could imagine with two or three jurisdictions, it would take time to get everyone to say yes.’
