06:59 PM
The rescue gallery of the Guillermo Gaviria Echeverri tunnel, in the El Toyo sector, finished excavating this Thursday, following their drilling faces came together following breaking the last wall that separated the two sides of the work.
The escape gallery is a tunnel that is built parallel to the main conduit and serves to quickly and safely deal with any novelty or emergency that occurs in the infrastructure, thus providing greater safety in its operation. This structure is 100 meters longer than the Guillermo Gaviria Echeverri Tunnel, although its interior section is smaller and only occupies a quarter of it (25 m2 compared to 110 m2). Both structures are linked by small connecting galleries 40 meters long, located every 400 meters.
The opening of the rescue gallery means that there is now internal communication between the Giraldo and Cañasgordas portals.
This is a preview of what will happen in July of this year, when the main tunnel will break through. For this, only 825 of the 9,730 meters that this tube has in total (91.51% completed) remain, which will be the one that the vehicles will travel through when this megaproject enters into operation in 2025, and that will turn it into the tunnel longest in America.
“We thank each of the women and men who have succeeded in opening the auxiliary gallery in the Guillermo Gaviria tunnel. We dug 9.8 kilometers into our mountains to be closer to our sea in Urabá,” said Governor Aníbal Gaviria Correa.
The El Toyo connection, in its two stages, adds 39.5 kilometers of new track and a design speed of 80 kilometers per hour, which will allow the journey from Medellín to Urabá to drop to 4.5 hours.
It will represent a reduction of 25 kilometers in the road that connects Santa Fe de Antioquia with Cañasgordas, which today is 62 kilometers. Stage one is the 9.73-kilometre Guillermo Gaviria Echeverri tunnel, in addition, it will have seven annexed tunnels, 16 bridges and 4.4 kilometers of new tracks.
The figures speak of the dimension of this megaproject that is being built with resources from the Governor’s Office, the Medellín Mayor’s Office and Invías to link the fourth-generation highways Mar 1 (Medellín-Santa Fe de Antioquia-) and Mar 2 (Cañasgordas-El Tiger).
The length of the project is like lining up 442 Medellín subway cars; and 1.43 million cubic meters have been excavated, which might be exemplified by a line of dump trucks that goes between Medellín and Cabo de la Vela, in La Guajira.