The Taihu tunnel, China’s longest and widest underwater highway, will open to traffic before the end of the year, according to Third Harbour Engineering, the contractor building it.
The tunnel will stretch for almost 11km under Lake Taihu, China’s third largest freshwater lake, about 50km east of Shanghai.
Work on the 43.6m-wide tunnel began in January 2018. According to China Communications Construction Company, the parent company of Third Harbour, the tunnel was built using cofferdams that were emptied of water, pumped, excavated and backfilled in sections to “protect the ecological environment of the lake as much as possible”.

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