K-Boringen diverts river into Luxembourg underground
In Luxembourg's Howald, K-Boringen started drilling 620 m under a busy traffic road last autumn, diverting the local river Drosbach. The new pipeline has a diameter of 3 m that will be pushed stepwise through the hard sandstone.
Project content
The client for these works is the city of Luxembourg, which, as part of a new stormwater network, decided to divert a river in Howald underground under the road surface of a busy thoroughfare. Digging a deep trench was apparently not an option because of its depth of 12 m below ground level. "We started on this compact site in September and, according to the schedule, by early February the drill head had to exit in the middle of a roundabout. We provided 10 m of bore per drilling day and this was taken care of by a team of six colleagues who stayed in Luxembourg for a week. A total of 155 pipe elements, each weighing 24 tonnes, had to be delivered from Germany", explains Kobe Kellens of APK Group. The drill head, weighing no less than 80 tonnes, was lifted from the subsurface during an overnight operation in mid-February and on its way back to Belgium for its next assignment.
SANDTON
Notable contingencies were not noted on this project. Soil testing had revealed that one was dealing with sandstone, and this naturally factored in extra wear and tear on the drilling equipment. The rocky soil is broken by steel cutting rollers that show wear depending on the geology.
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