Dr.

Hoek: El arte significa las cosas que tenemos

que hacer junto con la ciencia del diseño de
túneles para garantizar que los túneles realmente
se construyan de manera segura y funcionen. Hay
mucho arte en la construcción de túneles y, con
suerte, veremos cómo evoluciona a medida que
avance la conferencia. Una definición del arte de
hacer túneles podría ser esta:
Cambia a una diapositiva en la pantalla leyendo la
definición.

Dr. Hoek: Entonces, hay más que solo cavar un

hoyo y ponerle apoyo, en la construcción de
túneles. Hay mucha actividad que se lleva a cabo
para garantizar que logre estos objetivos de
mantener el perfil. Para determinar qué tipo de
problema puede encontrar; He construido esta
matriz de nueve condiciones.

Tensión in situ/resistencia del macizo rocoso. Hay

tres columnas etiquetadas como Masivo,
Bloqueado, Cortado (de izquierda a derecha) y
tres filas, leyendo Alto, Moderado, Bajo (de abajo
hacia arriba).
Entonces, los bloques literalmente se caen o se
deslizan porque no hay suficiente confinamiento
para mantenerlos en su lugar. Así que ese es un
caso especial. Y a medida que aumentan las
tensiones, a medida que se profundiza, la roca está
más entrelazada y es mucho más estable.

En el lado derecho, la columna que he llamado roca cortada, es roca que ha

sido perturbada tectónicamente, generalmente en ambientes alpinos o en el
Himalaya, en la India, los Andes en América del Sur, las Montañas Rocosas en
América del Norte. Estos se han formado por grandes movimientos de las
placas de la corteza y, en este movimiento en el proceso de formación de
montañas, han deformado severamente y en muchos casos roto la roca hasta
casi tener características similares a las del suelo. Y esa es una categoría especial
que obviamente empeora a medida que te vuelves, a medida que profundizas.

Se muestra el mismo gráfico de resistencia del macizo rocoso resaltando

imágenes masivas, bajas y moderadas en bloques con texto sobre condiciones
de excavación generalmente excelentes. Recortes al Dr. Hoek.

Dr. Hoek: Entonces, dividamos esto en algunos elementos más simples y el

primero se muestra aquí como condiciones generalmente excelentes para la
excavación de túneles o podría llamarlo el punto ideal de la excavación de
túneles. Si tiene suerte con su túnel, es posible que trabaje en estas condiciones
de vez en cuando, ya sea en una roca intacta muy buena o en una roca
fracturada pero donde las tensiones son lo suficientemente altas como para
sujetarla pero no lo suficiente como para romperlo. Y esas son muy buenas
condiciones para hacer túneles.

Se muestra la misma diapositiva, ahora resaltando la imagen en bloque y baja,

con una imagen secundaria superpuesta con cuñas que fallan y se deslizan
debido a la falta de tensiones de confinamiento.

Dr. Hoek: Y luego llegamos a este bicho raro justo en el medio de la roca en
bloques con tensiones muy bajas. Y verá en el boceto incluido allí, que puede
tener cuñas o bloques que se deslicen o se caigan de la masa rocosa, que ha
expuesto al excavar el túnel.
Transition to Dr. Hoek shown on screen with a slide in the top right corner
showing a drawing of a falling and sliding wedges. An image on the right shows
engineers in an underground tunnel. After a brief moment the slide enlarges to
fullscreen and then returns to Dr. Hoek speaking.

Dr. Hoek: Looking at an example, this is from a project in Argentina many years
ago where you could see a wedge has fallen out of the roof of that tunnel. And
so simplistically you would say well this is just a question of three-dimensional
geometry. You can go in there and measure the discontinuities that of course
the failure and design a rock bolt pattern that has sufficient capacity to keep
that block in place and that's the answer. Unfortunately, it's not quite that
simple because the question then arises and this particular tunnel,

A model of a tunnel is shown on screen and returns to Dr. Hoek speaking.

Dr. Hoek: was 12 meter in span, taken as a top heading and then benched
down another 10 meters. So it was the tailrace tunnel of a hardier scheme and
12-meter span, 18 meters high. So, we're looking at the top heading, the first 8
meters of excavation. And to go in there and install rockbolts is not as simple as
it sounds when you say it.

Photograph shown on screen with text that reads installation of rockbolts to

support wedges in the roof of a tunnel. Transitions back to Evert speaking.

Dr. Hoek: This is a photograph which might be a little bit difficult for you to
interpret but you can see a man in the middle of the photograph there drilling a
hole for a rock bolt using a what we call a jack link or a drill with a jack forcing it
into the rock. And you don't need me to tell you, that's a very dangerous
operation. So that you come to ask yourself, can I really put people under an 8-
meter-wide span fully open and ask them to do that job? The answer is no, you
can't. And so how do we overcome that? The answer is deceptively simple when
you think it through. And it introduces the concept of pilot tunneling, which we
use a lot in in tunnel driving.

A new slide is shown on screen with a model in the top left and a photograph in
the bottom right of machinery and engineers in a tunnel. After a moment, Dr.
Hoek is shown on screen again and the slide is moved to the top right corner of
the frame.

Dr. Hoek: So, if you take your 8-meter span and you drive a tunnel 6 meters
wide in the middle of it, 6 meters is wide enough that you can get your
machinery in there and still do your job but the wedge that you allow to form is
now reduced from a wedge of 123 tons in weight, to a wedge of 29 tons in
weight. It's also much more tightly clamped because you've got a smaller span
not as much relief, and so it's pretty much guaranteed that that wedge would be
stable, and you can get in there and put the bolts in. But you put the bolts in for
the final wedge you're expecting to occur when you open it out to eight meters.
So, you do it effectively in two stages. You drive the pilot tunnel ahead. You
support the rock overhead and ten meters behind you drive the wings forward.
So you're not impeding progress, the tunnel is still moving ahead at the same
rate but in two steps for the pilot tunnel and then the wings. And this is a
technique we'll see more and more of as I go through the lecture.

An image of a tunnel excavation with machinery and engineers standing. After a

sentence, Evert is shown on screen and this image is displayed throughout the
paragraph.

Dr. Hoek: Here's an example from a very shallow excavation of 18 meters span,
for an underground station cavern on the Oporto Metro in Portugal. So, this is
going to be a large station cavern and it's only about 20 or 30 meters
underground and it's in weathered granite, so pretty much soil with loose
boulders in it. A very difficult material to support. And if you get it wrong, you're
going to drop the whole thing into the into the cavern guaranteed. But what
was done in this case, is that the first step in the process was to drill as you see
on the left-hand side here, 12-meter-long holes into the rock above the cavern
you're going to create and to flush the soil out of those with the high-pressure
water and to fill them with grout with cement or concrete. So that you are
forming an umbrella of closely spaced holes of concrete, a concrete arch over
the face. Because not only do you have the roof trying to fall in, but the faces is
also coming towards you because it's unstable. So that protects the face, it
enables you to get in then, and now you can do your pilot tunnel through that
protected area as you see on the right. So, you see a machine working there,
excavating the material, and installed behind it is a structure of typically lattice
girders and shotcrete or shotcrete fiber reinforced. Some lining that is
sufficiently strong to hold the excavation while you are creating the pilot tunnel.
And then this wall is sacrificial, you remove that, and you remove the rest of the
tunnel. But you do it sequentially, so that you are never allowing any area of the
roof to be unsupported under which you're working.

The image of the Rock Mass Strength chart is shown again and described by Dr.
Hoek. An image of rocks being held in hands is in the bottom right and a
drawing is shown in the center with orange and pink areas.

Dr. Hoek: Moving now to the to the left-hand column of massive rock under
increasing stress. The failure of this rock under increasing stress is really a
function of tensile spalling. So, as you'll see in a moment, the stresses when
they're high enough on the boundary that you've created by excavating the
tunnel, exceed the tensile strength of the of the rock, and you get splinters or
plates or slivers of rock forming as you see on the lower right-hand photograph
there. And these become increasingly violent and loud as the stresses increase.

A new slide is shown on screen with the drawing from the previous slide in the
top left, a model showing mostly green and blue in the bottom left and a chart
in the top right.

Dr. Hoek: Here's an illustration of what I've just said. That if you calculate the
stresses around that that particular tunnel, the concentration of stress will occur
at particular points on the boundary and when that value there, which I've called
sigma max, the maximum stress, exceeds about 45 percent of the uniaxial
strength of the intact rock, tensile failure will occur. And that is demonstrated by
the graph I've included on the upper right there. These measurements are from
deformation measurements on specimens or measurements of acoustic
emission from micro geophones that are attached to the rock. And you can see
that igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic rocks all follow the same pattern.
Tensile failure starts at about 45% of the uniaxial strength of the rock.

A new slide is shown on screen with images in the top left and lower right and a
chart in the lower left. Alternates between the slide and Dr. Hoek on screen.

Dr. Hoek: And then there's another graph down in the lower left there which
has the same ratio of maximum stress to uniaxial strength. And you'll see the
failure starts there at about 40%. But it plots the depth of failure, and these are
simple observations from the field measurements that have been done in the
real world. And you start off with very shallow spalling. The lower right-hand
photograph there is of a shaft and where there's minor spalling in the walls as
you see there and just a small amount. And the top left-hand photograph shows
that this spalling is fairly easy to contain with mesh and rockbolts. The one big
feature of this spalling process is that once it happens and you don't allow the
rock to fall away, it’s self-stabilizing. So, you don't need to go back there and try
and stop it, but you have to retain the profile. So, you have to put something in
there that will prevent the rock spalling out because otherwise it will simply
continue as each free surface is created. So, we move on a little bit deeper
underground now,

A new slide is shown on screen with images in the top left, top right and bottom
right and a chart is shown in the bottom left. Dr. Hoek is shown on screen
alternating with the slide.

Dr. Hoek: and we get higher stresses and now we're getting pretty serious
failure of let's say the whole tunnel sidewall as you can see in the bottom right-
hand photograph. And this is much more difficult to deal with in mining where
you are dealing with irregular openings which are constantly being the stresses
are constantly being changed by mining adjacent areas. You have to try and
prevent this rock from failing further. And that is typically done by this process
of cable lacing, where you have rockbolts installed and mesh as we have in the
previous slide, during the early part of the mining and you then lace cables over
that by putting in a more or less a very large hairpin grouted in. And through
that, the eye, you lace the cables to form a very tight and very strong mesh over
the wire mesh that you put on in the first place. This is very deformable. It allows
the rock to breathe as it were but doesn't allow it to fall out. Brittle materials like
concrete or shotcrete, don't work in these circumstances because they are
simply too stiff and too brittle. So they will not accommodate the movement.

A new slide is shown on screen with images in the top left and bottom right
showing rock bursts and a chart in the bottom left.

Dr. Hoek: And finally, we come to the rock burst problem, where you're now
very deep. You might be two or three kilometers underground and where the
rock is failing violently.

A slide is shown with a map of Peru in the top left, a map with geology showing
faults in the bottom left and a 3-D illustration of the Olmos Project in Peru.
Alternates between the slide and Dr. Hoek on screen.

Dr. Hoek: And I’ll illustrate this by an example from a tunnel in Peru called the
Olmos tunnel. It's located right up in the north of Peru as you see in the slide
here. It's a tunnel that goes through the Andes Mountains to take water from
the wet area in the Andes to the dry coastal plains of Peru. And the tunnel is a
total length of about 18 kilometers. The original, you see that in this illustration
down here, the original few kilometers were mined under a Russian contract by
drill and blast. And that ended, and 13.8 kilometers were left to be mined by the
company that did this. You'll notice also, that this map on the left-hand side
here which is an accumulation of measurements and interpretations of in-situ
stresses around the world that is maintained in Germany called “The world
stress map” and the tunnel is being driven right across the Andes, parallel to the
highest principle stress. So, you can expect from the fact that it's two kilometers
below surface and its maximum that it's being driven across a major mountain
chain with huge stresses across it, that there will be problems. Now, physically
you cannot measure those stresses before you get there. So, you can't go down
two kilometers and measure the stresses in the rock. That technology does not
exist today. And so, all you can say is from our understanding, our knowledge of
the behavior of rock under these conditions, we're going to have rock bursts
there. And so, the philosophy adopted by Odebrecht, a company that was given
this project was to not to try and predict or to prevent the rock bursts but to
deal with the consequences. The contract is interesting because it was awarded
by the government of Peru to Odebrecht as a 20-year concession for design,
build, own, operate. That means the contractor provides the financing, does the
design, builds the tunnel, owns it, and operates it for 20 years and their income
is from the sale of the water that they transmit. After 20 years, they then hand it
back to the government of Peru. So it's a very common type of contract but a
very good one for this type of project because there's a very high incentive for
the contractor to complete it, so that he starts earning his return from the
transmission of water. I'm going to show you a video now of rock bursting in
the tunnel just to give you a feel what this might look like. And the video lasts a
couple of minutes, but you'll be able to see the effects of rock bursting.

Video plays with loud clanging sounds. Someone is recording from a piece of
machinery point up at the top of the tunnel where rock bursts coming from the
ceiling of a tunnel. Two small bursts precede a larger burst and rock debris
breaks through the lining and falls.

Dr. Hoek: That's not the sort of place you would necessarily want to work but in
this particular project, it turned out to be safe. To my knowledge, there were no
fatalities at all, no accidents during the driving of that 13.8 kilometers of tunnel.
I have to explain to you the method they used to overcome or to deal with the
consequences. And they decided right from the beginning that they would line
the whole tunnel with steel sets, which are I beams, steel I beams, which are
bent into a circular shape in this case, as you see there.

A slide with two images showing a circular steel set. The top left shows a tube at
the top of the tunnel and the bottom right images shows detail of a precast
concrete invert. After a moment, Dr. Hoek is shown on screen and alternates to
the slide again.

Dr. Hoek: So, these are the are the steel sets and they're attached to a concrete
invert the bottom layer which goes in first right along the base of the tunnel as
its mined. And that invert contains a drainage ditch in the center as you see
there and the ties for rail lines. So, as that invert is laid and as the sets are
attached to it and the spacing between the sets is governed by the grippers of
the tunnel boring machine which hold the tunnel, hold the machine in place
while it thrust forward and cuts the rock. As the tunnel progresses, the rail line is
laid, the waters drained. And so, you have high-speed transportation to the face
at all times and you have drainage of the water out. And so, as the tunnel
progresses, those sets will take care of most of the minor popping and bursting
that you saw in the video. Sometimes with a little bit of deformation of the sets
or of the of the reinforcing above the sets, but safe enough for people to work
in. And typically, what they would do would be to stop for half-an-hour after the
machine has pushed ahead. It does one cut of about one and a half meters for
every thrust of the cylinders and then they stop and reposition. And they
typically left half an hour after that stop for all of the after bursting to take place
and things to calm down before the crews went back. And this worked very well.
They had one major rock burst, which is equivalent to a man-generated
earthquake. So, you can actually measure it on the Richter scale.

An image is shown on screen of the aftermath of a large rock burst. Rock has
burst out from the lining of the tunnel. Alternates between the image and Dr.
Hoek on screen.

Dr. Hoek: And that was a very damaging effect. You can see that the steel sets
were bent out of shape. The machine was quite severely damaged and required
about three months to rebuild some of the components. But the important
thing about this is that the steel sets are deformable. So, in spite of the fact that
this one in the foreground is bent right out of shape, it still has capacity to keep
the damaged rock back. And so, because they had high speed transportation,
they could bring their crews in almost immediately and start cleaning up. And
they simply remove the damaged sets, replace them, and open the ground up
because once, as I said earlier on, once the spore or a burst has occurred, the
energy has been dissipated it won't reoccur except for a little bit of after activity
behind the machine. But these are bursts that occur at or ahead of the face. And
once the energy has been released, that's it. You’re quite safe to go in there and
do the repairs and repair the machine. And the tunnel was successfully
completed and is now in operation delivering water to the coastal plains of
Peru.

An image appears on screen of a tunnel which appears to be completed with

shotcrete lining. Lights hang on the left-hand side and a large tube runs across
the top.

Dr. Hoek: The tunnel, about a hundred meters behind the machine with a steel
set installation, shotcrete lining was applied so that tunnel as I say is complete
and in operation. The same philosophy was used in a tunneling project in China
to bring water from the Yellow River to towns or cities in the Gobi Desert which
required water urgently when this project was set up. And they didn't have rock
bursts in that tunnel. The tunnel was relatively shallow, perhaps maximum depth
of four or five hundred meters, going through a variety of rocks. And what they
did was they assessed the conditions along the hundred kilometers of tunnel
that had to be built, and they decided that if they used machines with long
telescopic shields and they installed immediately behind the shields, concrete
linings, as it was of the type Illustrated here,

Two images are shown on screen. Top left image a man stands in a honeycomb
segment of concrete lining. The bottom right shows a close up of the invert
detail. After a moment, Dr. Hoek is shown on screen.
they could go right through this at very high speed with minimal problems. And
provided the design of thickness and the strength of the concrete lining is
adequate, that proved to be the case. And they achieved very high rates of
advance of in some of the time there were four machines operating
simultaneously and they achieved up to a kilometer a month in some of them.
So, they completed the hundred kilometers in about two years of excavation
which is very very high in advance rates. They did have problems. They
occasionally got into a fault and the machine got stuck in the mud as it were,
and they had to stop and dig it out and repair it. But the overall progress was so
high that a two or three-week event of that kind really didn't damage their
overall process of very high-speed tunneling. So that's the art of tunneling.
Coming to the other end, the really bad rock which is in many cases very close
to a soil in its characteristics,

The slide of Rock Mass Strength is shown highlighting the three images under
the sheared column. An image of a rock is overlaid in the bottom left of the
chart and a drawing of a tunnel with red hatching and blue arrows is in the
middle of the slide.

Dr. Hoek: and where you see this kind of surface in the core where it's been
sheared, these are called slickensides, where the rock has moved and it's at very
low strength. How do we deal with what happens in a tunnel here?

An image of a tunnel blocked by rock with engineers looking at it. Alternates

with Dr. Hoek speaking on screen.

Dr. Hoek: Here's an example from a project in India. A hydroelectric project, 27-
kilometer-long headrace tunnel to a hydro project. In general, the tunneling was
good, but they reached one area where there was a known very large fault. And
as they approached the fault, the ground got worse and worse, so they started
installing steel sets. And finally, they got into the fault proper, and they simply
could not control it. You can see here that the sets have been severely
deformed. There's about a meter of displacement and the tunnel is clearly
unstable. Not acceptable. A lot of work went into that, to try and figure out what
to do. And finally, they brought in an Italian contractor and consultant to do a
process called forepolling.

An illustration is shown explaining forepolling. Text reads Advancing a tunnel

under a forepole umbrella. The image also shows additional rockbolts (if
required) as well as labels identifying steel ribs, invert strut and cast in place
concrete invert which weren’t explained verbally. Alternates between the slide
and Dr. Hoek speaking.
Dr. Hoek: And this is rather similar to the earlier example I showed you in
Portugal, but in this case the rock is so bad, and its clay rich so you can't flush it
easily, it's too sticky. And so, what they do here is drill in pipes basically, 12
meters long and about 100 millimeters in diameter. And these are drilled right
ahead of the tunnel to form an umbrella over the face and concrete is injected
into the pipes, so they're grouted into place. In addition, you can, if necessary,
use 12-meter-long fiberglass rods, which are grouted into the face ahead of the
tunnel. You use fiberglass because you can cut it off easily and it doesn't
impede your progress. And behind those under the protection of the umbrella,
you then create your normal steel sets and shotcrete or concrete lining. This is a
very expensive process; it puts the cost of tunneling up by a factor of 2 or 3
from normal tunneling. And it's only used in exceptional circumstances of this
kind. But it is very effective.

An image is shown on screen of a forepolling machine. Engineers look on at the

tunnel. Yellow dots are outlined in the top of the tunnel. Transitions back to Dr.
Hoek on screen after a moment.

Dr. Hoek: And there's a photograph of the forepolling machine, drilling the
forepoles. And along the arch there, there's a step and you can see yellow marks
where the forepoles are going to be installed. And they close together and form
and more or less a continuous arch above the face to protect you. And they
successfully worked their way through a very large fault using this technique.

A new slide is shown on screen with an illustration of the Yacambu-Quibor

water transfer tunnel, Venezuela. Alternates between the slide and Dr. Hoek.

Dr. Hoek: Another project that is even more extreme, is this one which is in
Venezuela. It's called the Yacambu-Quibor project and it's a 25-kilometer-long
tunnel to take water again from a wet area through into a very fertile but very
dry area near the city of Barquisimeto in Venezuela. The cover, in this case, is
about 1,200 - 1,300 meters. So, it's quite deep but the rock is extremely poor.
It's close to a large number of major faults and it's been distorted and deformed
to the point where it has very low strength. The tunnel project was started in
1976 and it took them 33 years to mine all the way through. For a variety of
reasons, there were problems. One of which was the selection of inappropriate
tunnel shapes.

A slide is shown with two images. Top left is a green axe in the middle of grey
rock. The bottom right shows an engineer looking down at the bottom of the
tunnel.

Dr. Hoek: The upper-left photograph shows the deformed graphitic phyllite,
which is the rock layer mining through; very weak and with very little residual
interlocking structure. And the lower right is a photograph of a horseshoe-
shaped tunnel that was chosen for some of the early excavations. A horseshoe is
not a good shape because the rock tends to squeeze in all directions and the
first thing it will do is pop the floor up and break the connection between the
walls and floor as you see there. And ultimately, that leads to almost a complete
collapse of the tunnel.

A new image showing many miners working on the tunnel excavation.

Dr. Hoek: This is many years after the tunnel had converged to this level and
they simply go back and remine it. But that's a very expensive and very time-
consuming operation.

Dr. Hoek shown speaking.

Dr. Hoek: So, the question is how do you deal with this from a design
engineering point of view?

A new slide is shown with an illustration of a tunnel shown in purple and the
face shown in red with arrows. Alternates back to Dr. Hoek speaking.

Dr. Hoek: This is an illustration showing how a tunnel deforms, as it's mined
through the ground. So, the tunnel is coming towards me, shown by the red
arrow advancing out of the out of the screen towards me. And as the tunnel
moves forward, displacements start one or two tunnel diameters ahead of the
other tunnel in the rock. The rock starts to feel the tunnel coming. By the time
the tunnel face arrives about a third of the final displacement has already taken
place, and that's shown by this point here. And obviously the tunnel face is also
bulging inwards, so that has to be thought about it and dealt with. And about
two tunnel diameters behind the face, you've reached the maximum
displacement that occurs. Now in good rock, these displacements might only be
a millimeter or so you don't worry about them.

The image of multiple miners in the tunnel is shown again. After a moment,
Evert is shown on screen again.

Dr. Hoek: In bad rock, such as this one, the displacement, the maximum
displacement here, could be one or two meters. In fact, the tunnel in some
cases, closed up altogether, disappeared and had to be re-mined. And so, the
way you deal with that is by installing support. But you have to be very careful
when you put that support in because you can calculate how much support you
need to prevent further displacement. Once your support capacity and the lack
of capacity and the rock meet, the tunnel will be stable.
Image of a plot with an illustration of a tunnel with arrows pointing in in the top
right corner. Alternates between the slide and Dr. Hoek shown on screen.

Dr. Hoek: So, this plot here is of the support pressure from the rock ahead of
the face. So, imagine that the face is being supported by the rock in front of it.
Behind it, you've created a cavity but then the face is still close enough that it's
providing support and as you move away from it that support becomes less and
less. So, your deformation increases in this direction, as you move away from
the face. Now, if you put your support in too early, the danger is that the
capacity will be exceeded so if you put into say steel sets or shotcrete lining, it
would have to be very heavy, very heavy indeed to accommodate the support
pressure you need to stabilize the tunnel. How do you get a meter of concrete
into an advancing tunnel? You can't. So, what you do is you put the support in
in a rudimentary form of let's say steel sets, but you allow it to yield, and it is
only activated when you are sure that its capacity will be adequate. So, the blue
line here is a yielding support system, which kicks in perhaps 15 meters behind
the face and as it picks up the load, it reaches the intersection with a required
support line and stabilizes the tunnel. The trick is how do you allow it to yield?
And it turns out to be very simple, you just put sliding joints in the steel sets.

A new slide is shown with images in the top left and bottom right. In the top left
miners are shown in a tunnel with sliding joints installed. The bottom right
shows a closeup of the sliding joint clamp.

Dr. Hoek: So, the steel sets go in here and they are shotcreted in place, but you
leave a window of about a meter on either side. And in that window, you allow a
30-centimeter gap, in this case it's a 5.2-meter tunnel, 30 centimeter gap on
either side will allow it to close 0.2 of a meter. So, you're allowing it to close
from five point two meters, you over excavated down to five meters and the
joint simply slide until they the ends butt together and then the sets are locked
up and you complete the installation of shotcrete and you put another layer in.
And you end up with a tunnel which is now completely lined, in this case with
0.6 meters of shotcrete lining.

An image is shown of a man in orange in a section of completed tunnel with

0.6m thick shotcrete lining. After a moment, Dr. Hoek is shown on screen.

Dr. Hoek: And you might need to come back and put another lining inside that
for long-term stability. That process, from beginning to end to this point, took
33 years. There's still a few years left. It's not in operation yet, while they figure
out what additional lining has to be placed in there. So, this hopefully has been
a brief summary of some of the art that goes with the science of tunnel
engineering and that enables us to construct tunnels in what I think you will
agree are some very very difficult rock and stress conditions that we are
increasingly encountering around the world. As the population of the world
increases, we need more and more space and more and more of our
infrastructure is going underground. More and more trans-mountain tunnels are
needed to bring water and oil and transportation, people, from one place to
another and so these difficult tunnels are increasingly going to be our daily
bread in the field of rock engineering.

Screen Fades to Black. Text appears reading Practical Rock Engineering Lecture
Series is sponsored by Rocscience. Text appears reading software tools for rock
and soil.