Assessment gives HZMB grade of nearly 100 percent

The Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge 29.6-km (18.4-mile) main section has satisfied the requirements of trial operation and been approved for service upon scoring 99.17, it was announced by an expert panel established by the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Authority at an inspection and acceptance conference on Feb 6.

A hundred and fifty representatives of the authority and construction companies surveyed the Jiuzhou, Jianghai, and Qingzhou navigation channels, subsea marine tunnel, and Eastern Artificial Island before the acceptance was made public in the afternoon.

Representatives survey the bridge section [Photo courtesy Xinhua News Agency]

The above-sea portion was reviewed the previous day at a seminar after which Man Chung Tang, a foreign academician from the Chinese Academy of Engineering, proclaimed the mega bridge as clearly safe, practical, economical, and aesthetically pleasing.

The HZMB was listed along with Beijing Airport in 2015 by British newspaper The Guardian as one of the "Megastructures: seven wonders of the modern world." At the time, it was in the midst of six years of preparation and eight years of construction, which commenced on Dec 15, 2009.

Designed to stand 120 years, which reportedly is longer than any other bridge on the Chinese mainland, the HZMB is built to withstand typhoons up to Gale Force 16 and earthquakes up to Magnitude 8 on the Richter scale.

The structure connects Zhuhai and Macao in the west to Hong Kong in the east. It is expected to stimulate the economy in the Pearl River Delta area by slashing travel time between Hong Kong and Zhuhai from three hours to just 30 minutes.

HZM Bridge main section inspected [Photo by Chen Xinnian / Zhuhai Daily] 

The project includes three Boundary-Crossing Facilities in Hong Kong, Zhuhai and Macao, with a 12.74-km (8-mile) link to Zhuhai and a 12-km (7.5-mile) link to Hong Kong.

The main section has been called the Mount Everest (Chomolungma Peak) of the transportation industry. It is composed of the principal 22.9-km (14.2-mile) bridge section, two 100,000-sq-m (1,076-sq-ft) engineered islands, and 6.7-km (4.2-mile) tunnel located 100 m (328 ft) under the Lingding Sea of the Pearl River Estuary. It runs from the marine border between Hong Kong and Guangdong (K5+972.45) along the north side of the 23DY anchorage before crossing Tonggu and Lingding West channels via the tunnel. The bridge passes the Qingzhou, Jianghai, and Jiuzhou navigation channels to link up with the Zhuhai-Macao frontier port island (K35+890).

After seven years of often ingenious effort by more than 10,000 engineers and workers from China Communications Construction Co (CCCC), the main bridge was completed on Sept 27, 2016 and the island-tunnel section finished on July 7, 2017. The main section was fully connected on Dec 31 last year, a key step toward opening to traffic in mid-2018.

The bridge utilizes some of the most advanced technologies and minimizes environmental side-effects, according to Feng Yinghui, deputy chief architect at CCCC-FHDI Engineering, a subsidiary of CCCC. The elegant bridge design and fluid shape of the islands are the result of the clever architectural formation, she added, as engineers took advantage of every resource available. Feng also said that this experience could serve as the basis for future projects.