Assurance given on safety of port tunnel project

The engineers involved in the £200 million-plus Dublin Port Tunnel project "are absolutely committed to ensure that safety gets the highest priority" when construction work starts early next year.

This assurance was given yesterday by Dublin Corporation's deputy project engineer, Mr Hugh Cregan, following a second damning report by Britain's Health and Safety Executive on the 1994 collapse of tunnels for the Heathrow Express rail link.

Geoconsult, an Austrian engineering consultancy which has been advising on the port tunnel, was fined £500,000 at the Old Bailey in London last year over its role in the Heathrow collapse. The main contractor, Balfour Beatty, was fined £1.2 million.

Mr Cregan pointed out that Geoconsult's involvement in the Dublin project was a joint venture with Arup, the long-established civil engineering consultants, though the same New Austrian Tunnelling Method (NATM) implicated in Heathrow might also be used.

He said the port tunnel, which will run from the M1 Coolock Lane interchange to the north port area, was a "beneficiary" of the lessons learned from the Heathrow collapse and, in particular, of the safety guidelines laid down by Britain's HSE for the use of NATM.

Describing the first HSE report on the Heathrow incident as a "seminal document", Mr Cregan said the port tunnel design team was committed to implementing its recommendations and had even hired one of its authors, Mr John Anderson, as a safety consultant.

"Everything we do in this area is overviewed by him. It should also be noted that Geoconsult's contract is up when the construction contract is awarded and we have advertised for a separate supervision contract to start when the work gets under way, probably in January."

Mr Cregan said one of the "basic errors" in the Heathrow collapse was that the same consultants who had been involved in designing the rail-link tunnel were also supervising it. However, he could not say whether Geoconsult had sought the port tunnel supervision contract.

A total of five submissions were received by the closing date of last Friday for the main contract, mostly from overseas civil engineering firms. It would take time to assess these submissions, but the project team hopes to appoint one by the autumn.

Mr Cregan also noted that agreement had been reached with the Marino Development Action Group, which has opposed the project, to enable one test borehole to be drilled at a specific location in the area and this work was now being completed. Though the project team had planned to drill five boreholes in the area, he said an independent consultant agreed by both sides had advised that one would be sufficient.

Mr Cregan said the latest cost estimate for the twin-bore tunnel, which will carry two lanes of traffic in each direction, was £204 million (at 1999 prices) though the tenders would be "the real test". It should be completed by summer 2004, some four years behind schedule.