Establish and maintain
Special excavator and cranes are needed to build and maintain national infrastructure, be it in Egypt or Switzerland. The multifarious undertakings involved can be the building of a road tunnel, or the cleaning of filter grilles in a hydroelectric power station.
Heavy building work is currently going on at the Suez Canal, near the northern Egyptian city of Port Said. The project is for the drilling of two road tunnels through the earth under the canal. An international construction corporation is busy with the building work on this project, and it is deploying Liebherr cable excavators and caterpillar cranes for the task. They are needed to build slotted walls covering around 520,000 sqm. These walls are needed both on the eastern as well as the western sides of the Suez Canal, where access roads and access shafts for later tunnel digging work will subsequently need to be established. Various types of cable excavators are in action at the site, including four HS 885 HDs, two HS 875 HDs as well as a single LR 1160 caterpillar crane.
Egypt is currently making great investments in expanding and reconfiguring its national infrastructure. Besides the road tunnels being built in Port Said, there is a similar ongoing project in the city of Ismailia, also located on the canal, approximately 100 km southeast of the maritime hub of Port Said. In December 2016 the World Bank authorised a USD 1 billion loan for works in the energy production and transport infrastructure sector, with the Suez Canal also set to be widened and deepened. A 35 km side arm is also expected to be built in the north.
Even further north, in Switzerland, to be precise, another Liebherr HS 8130 HD cable excavator has been in action since mid-2016. It is deployed to work on the Lago di Luzzone reservoir in the southern canton of Ticino. It is currently based on a barge moored in the middle of the 3.1 km long reservoir, which covers around 1.27 sqkm. It hauls up deposits that have formed on the filter grilles. Around 125,000 cbm of deposits have accumulated in the reservoir, at depths of up to 200 m. The unit is expected to remain on site for a total of two years.
A special double-shovelled excavator was constructed especially for the task on hand. It can handle up to 10 cbm per grab, which means that overall, the digger can haul around 130 cbm of deposits up to the surface per hour.
The reservoir is rather difficult to reach, which is why the delivery of the equipment was already quite hard. The barge and the cable excavator, which had had to be taken apart, had to pass through many sharp road bends, two mountain tunnels and over the 225 m dam. Before starting work the unit was put together again on the shores of the reservoir.
