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China's rate of infrastructure development continues to astonish and the extraordinary pace of underground infrastructure development was high on the agenda when delegates gathered in Shanghai for the 5th International Symposium on Tunnelling. Organised by a team of high-ranking industry, academic and government-authority engineers, the two day event, held every second year, attracted more than 500 delegates from throughout China and included about 75 delegates from overseas.
Factory tour of the 14.9m machine for another Huangpu River highway crossing with tour hosts (from right) YANG Fang Qing of Shanghai Bridge and Tunnel Co and DU Xiao Mei of STECMC and visitors (from left) Søren Degn Eskesen, Casper Paludan-M¨ąller, Martin Knights, and TunnelTalk Editor Shani Wallis
As a co-sponsored event, the ITA had high profile presence with the delegation led by President In-Mo Lee from Korea, Immediate Past President Martin Knights from the UK and former Secretary-General Claude Berenguier of France who is now Executive Director of the Association's Committee on Education and Training (ITACET). Other notable ITA members and internationals who also presented papers included Søren Degn Eskesen, Ow Chun Nam, Nick Barton, Remo Grandori, Pietro Lunardi, Johannes de Wit, Tadashi Hashimoto, and Casper Paludan-M¨ąller.
Supported by the Shanghai Municipal Government and organised by the information division of the Shanghai Tunnel Engineering Company (STEC), the event reaches back to a time a few short decades ago when China was thirsty for information and technology from foreign companies and organisations. Now there is much to know from the Chinese counterparts, particularly in their approach to city planning, their triumphs of underground infrastructure construction, their ambitions for new major projects, as well as the problems and failures that their rapid expansion and construction has exacted. These were shared in several papers that focused on risk, risk management and tunnel failure and recovery. Leading individuals of China's underground civil engineering fraternity, including WANG Zhenxin, retired Chief Engineer with Shanghai's Metro Construction Corporation; Professor SHI Peidong, Professor of Geo-Engineering at the Zhejiang Institute of Building Research & Design; and GUO Shanyun of the Tunnel & Underground Works Branch of China's Civil Engineering Society, departed from set paper texts to warn of the hazards of rapid development, without thorough consideration of planning concerns and design limitations, illustrating their points with examples of major failures in China over the past years.
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