The city's first-ever underground Metro-3 corridor from Colaba to SEEPZ has crossed the Mithi river's main channel. On Thursday, the Mumbai Metro Rail Corporation officials stated that of the 1.18km tunnels being built between the Bandra-Kurla Complex (BKC) and Dharavi station, 270 metres (m) come under an active river channel, which has been crossed. The remaining work for the tunnel is expected to be completed by the end of March.
“Of the two tunnels, one tunnel has achieved 87 per cent progress, while another has achieved 65 per cent progress. However, we have already crossed the active river channel. We are also tunnelling almost 10m every day, so we aim to finish the rest of the work in a month’s time,” SK Gupta, director (project), MMRC told HT.
The active river channel is the portion of the river where water continuously flows. Due to which, the area is the most challenging part to tunnel under. The 33.5 km Metro-3 corridor (Colaba-Andheri-Seepz) will be the second Metro in the country to have tunnels under a riverbed. The first tunnel is being constructed in Kolkata under Hooghly river.
Meanwhile, MMRC is using special gaskets that swell as they come in contact with water. This will prevent water seepage between the segments of the tunnels. A segment is used to form the rings of the tunnel and each ring has about six segments in it.
Earlier this month, MMRC had finished 76 per cent of the tunnelling for the Colaba-Bandra-SEEPZ route. According to the proposed plan, the Colaba-Bandra-SEEPZ route will be a 55-km long fully underground metro tunnel.
Currently, 17 Tunnel Boring Machines (TBMs) are conducting the tunnelling work and MMRCL intends to complete the tunnelling by December 2020. Then the metro rail corporation plans to make the line operational in two phases – Aarey to BKC by December 2021 and BKC to Cuffe Parade by mid-2022.
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