The project will cover an area of 490 km2, which is almost 40% of the entire urban area of Dubai.
The drilling machine is expected to arrive at the site in October 2018 and excavation will begin in December.
A delegation from Dubai Municipality headed by its Director General, Dawood Al Hajiri visited the Chinese city of Guangzhou to learn about the stages of manufacturing of the drilling machine.
The project was launched in October last year and is due to be completed by September 2020, as Dubai Municipality said its “racing to complete the project before the World Expo set to be held in 2020”.
Dubai will be purchasing two large Tunnel Boring Machines (TBM) for drilling deep tunnels for the project. The finished internal diameter of the tunnel will be 10 meters.
The municipality said these machines will be the largest in the region used for digging tunnels that will be used for transporting storm water.
Al Hajiri said: “TBM 1 will begin its drilling work from the starting of the seventh intersection on Sheikh Zayed Road for a distance of 2.4 km towards the sea up to the location of the main pumping station. It will then be dismantled and reassembled to move from the seventh intersection until the eighth intersection along 1.7 km.”
The manufacturing and installation of one drainage system will take 364,000 man-hours, and the daily energy consumption of the first device will be 64 MW taking the total consumption in 12 months to approximately 20,156 MWh. More
