Tunnelling-The Best Solution for Your Construction Needs
It is amazing how many times during our travels that different sites and scenes bring the whole concept of tunnelling to mind. Some of the countryside scenes have more to do with animals than with man’s endeavours. Experiences of camping in France always seem to reflect the incident of Mr mole busily tunnelling under our ground sheet. When we talk about things going bump in the night it is normally a referral to some supernatural aberration but on our camping expedition it became a reality. I had felt some movement under my air mattress for a few nights but passed no remarks as I thought I was just imagining it. After a week of imaginings I peeled back the ground sheet to find to my horror a maze of collapsing tunnels.
The penny dropped and I realised I had a tunnelling visitor each night – Mr Mole. The only solution for the remainder of the camping holiday was to reinforce the groundsheet. Thankfully Mr mole got the message and discontinued his tunnelling for the duration. Another visible tunnelling activity in the countryside is the presence of badger sets, foxholes and rabbit warrens. In all of these cases tunnelling is to be welcomed as an environmental necessity for the sustenance and survival of animal life in the countryside. There are also many signs of man’s tunnelling to access water supply and build wells in many parts of the countryside especially on farms and beside private residences. Tunnelling is justifiable to provide the basic necessities of life and this becomes all the more significant in cities all over the world when tunnels are built to facilitate human transport, utility supplies, sewage systems, underground rail networks.
When it comes down to scientific research it’s a matter of opinion if finding the Hig’s bosun justifies tunnelling over 6 km long to create a circular circuit to accommodate the Hadron collider. On a local level there are many instances of tunnelling in towns and cities and one that comes to mind is an underground pass to facilitate pedestrian movement under busy road junctions. These common facilities indicate how important tunnelling can be to accommodate either road or pedestrian traffic in congested urban areas. Tunnelling in the case of a local hotel enabled them to create a walkway under a very busy main road so hotel patrons could move safely from an older part of the hotel to a new extension on the other side of the road. In this case tunnelling helped a hotelier to consolidate and expand his business, something of great economic value both to the individual and the community.
Where new motorways have been built through virgin countryside tunnelling has been necessary to accommodate local farmers in moving livestock across the motorway from one field to another. The provision of such infrastructure has also involved tunnelling for the installation of large pipes to divert waterways and sometimes to provide access to farmyards and farmers homes. From these few examples of tunnelling we can appreciate the important role of this activity in both the human and animal world.
Terra Solutions is a leading trenchless civil engineering contractor specialising in Tunnelling and Directional Drilling
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