Inside the world’s deepest and longest subsea road tunnel
Inside the world’s deepest and longest subsea road tunnel
探秘全球最深、最长的海底公路隧道
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY It’s cold, it’s very, very noisy, and—if I can be quite honest with you—I’m not feeling super relaxed. I’m currently around 300 meters, or 1,000 feet, beneath the North Sea, in a dark, dank cave. It smells weird. And I am increasingly aware of the pressure from millions of tons of seawater just above my head, pushing down with a force of more than 500 pounds per square inch. Picture a baby rhino standing on a postage stamp. Only fabulous engineering is keeping me from being crushed, drowned, disappeared. My safety goggles are foggy. Just a few hundred meters away, someone is about to blow up a giant rock wall.
执行摘要 这里很冷，非常吵，而且说实话，我感觉并不怎么放松。我目前身处北海下方约 300 米（1,000 英尺）处，在一个阴暗潮湿的洞穴里。空气中弥漫着一股怪味。我越来越强烈地意识到，头顶上方数百万吨的海水正以每平方英寸超过 500 磅的压力向下挤压。想象一下，一只小犀牛站在一张邮票上。全靠精湛的工程技术，我才没有被压扁、淹没或消失。我的护目镜上蒙着雾气。就在几百米外，有人正准备炸开一堵巨大的岩壁。
Luckily, earlier that day I was given a full safety briefing, and I’ve got a special hard hat on. “Don’t worry—if you don’t make it, we’ll have your stuff sent back to your office,” geologist Anne-Merete Gilje tells me, straight-faced. Ah, Norwegian humor. “It’s kind of a lifestyle. You have to be a little bit crazy to work underground all the time.” Niclas Brusehed, tunnel foreman, Implenia.
幸运的是，当天早些时候我接受了全面的安全简报，并戴上了特制的安全帽。“别担心，如果你没能活着出来，我们会把你的东西寄回你的办公室，”地质学家安妮-梅雷特·吉尔耶（Anne-Merete Gilje）面无表情地对我说。啊，这就是挪威式幽默。“这算是一种生活方式吧。你得有点疯狂，才能一直在这地下工作。”Implenia 公司的隧道工头尼克拉斯·布鲁塞赫德（Niclas Brusehed）说道。
I’m in this odd situation under the iconic fjords of Norway to visit what will soon become the world’s longest and deepest subsea road tunnel, called Rogfast (short for “Rogaland Fixed Link”). I want to understand how you make something as audacious as a 26.7-kilometer (16.6-mile) highway that sits 390 meters (1,280 feet) below the sea at its deepest point. And also—at a time when it can feel hard to get anything done, especially in the US—to reassure myself that ambitious engineering is still possible. That we can still make things.
我之所以身处挪威标志性的峡湾之下，是为了参观即将成为世界上最长、最深的海底公路隧道——Rogfast（“罗加兰固定连接”的缩写）。我想了解人们是如何建造出如此大胆的工程：一条全长 26.7 公里（16.6 英里）、最深处位于海平面以下 390 米（1,280 英尺）的高速公路。同时，在当今这个似乎很难办成任何事情的时代（尤其是在美国），我也想向自己证明，雄心勃勃的工程依然可行。我们依然能够创造奇迹。
The Norwegians already have the world’s longest subsea tunnel, the 14.4-kilometer Ryfylke, though Rogfast will dwarf it. Their expertise has attracted attention from Japan, Spain, Morocco, and even a number of US states, whose representatives were due to visit the site in May, just weeks after I went. They, too, want to know how Norway does it. The answer: tons of explosives.
挪威已经拥有了世界上最长的海底隧道——14.4 公里的吕菲尔克（Ryfylke）隧道，但 Rogfast 将使它相形见绌。挪威的专业技术已经吸引了日本、西班牙、摩洛哥甚至美国多个州的关注，这些地区的代表计划在我参观后的几周内（即五月份）前往现场考察。他们也想知道挪威人是怎么做到的。答案是：数吨的炸药。
The entire endeavor feels like an obstinate refusal to give in to physics and geology. “It’s always exciting,” Niclas Brusehed, a tunnel foreman at Implenia, a Swiss firm involved in the project, tells me. “Every blast creates a new world.” There’s not just the blasting of the tunnel itself—although that is an epic project on its own—but an immense logistics challenge involving huge ventilation shafts, extreme pressure, underground roundabouts, and the complex Norwegian geology. Oh, and the water. So much water.
整个工程感觉就像是对物理学和地质学的一种顽强抗争。“这总是令人兴奋的，”参与该项目的瑞士公司 Implenia 的隧道工头尼克拉斯·布鲁塞赫德告诉我，“每一次爆破都创造了一个新世界。”这不仅仅是隧道本身的爆破——尽管这本身就是一个史诗级的工程——还涉及巨大的物流挑战，包括巨大的通风井、极端的压力、地下环岛以及复杂的挪威地质结构。哦，还有水。太多的水了。
“This is the longest continuous blast on the sea,” says John Olaf Østerhus, assistant project manager at Implenia. “Never been done before. We can’t buy a book to see how we do this.” All right, time to fish my phone out of my safety suit—don’t want to forget this.
“这是海上最长的连续爆破工程，”Implenia 的助理项目经理约翰·奥拉夫·奥斯特胡斯（John Olaf Østerhus）说，“以前从未有过先例。我们买不到任何参考书来指导我们如何完成这项工作。”好了，是时候从防护服里掏出手机了——我可不想忘了记录这些。
On another planet 在另一个星球上
Arriving at the rock face where the tunnel hits seabed feels like being on the moon. It’s a huge slab of stone at the end of a long, dark, wet, wide passageway that’s lit (barely) by electric lights. Giant vehicles carting tons of rocks rumble past periodically, and we pull to the side of the road to let them by.
到达隧道触及海床的岩壁处，感觉就像是在月球上。那是一块巨大的岩石，位于一条漫长、黑暗、潮湿且宽阔的通道尽头，通道里只有微弱的电灯照明。运载着数吨岩石的巨型车辆不时轰鸣而过，我们不得不靠边停车让行。
Workers clock in for 12-hour shifts, 6 a.m. until 6 p.m., deep in the bowels of the Earth where no natural light can reach. Twelve days on, 16 days off. They eat their lunch at a table in this damp cave surrounded by portacabins plastered with safety notices. “It’s kind of a lifestyle,” says Brusehed, laughing. “You have to be a little bit crazy to work underground all the time.”
工人们在地球深处进行 12 小时的轮班，从早上 6 点到晚上 6 点，那里没有任何自然光。工作 12 天，休息 16 天。他们在这个潮湿的洞穴里的一张桌子上吃午饭，周围是贴满安全告示的活动板房。“这算是一种生活方式，”布鲁塞赫德笑着说，“你得有点疯狂，才能一直在这地下工作。”
These crazy engineers are here to make tunnels the Norwegian way. The nation frequently uses what’s known as the drill-and-blast method instead of the tunnel-boring machines that are more typical elsewhere. This approach offers more flexibility for long, complex operations with varied rock types. Each blast adds about five to six meters to the tunnel.
这些疯狂的工程师们在这里以挪威的方式建造隧道。该国经常使用所谓的“钻爆法”，而不是其他地方更常见的隧道掘进机（TBM）。这种方法为处理岩石类型多样的长距离、复杂工程提供了更大的灵活性。每一次爆破能让隧道向前推进约五到六米。
Rogfast is being built inward from the ends to speed things up. The construction company Skanska is leading from the north, coming from the island of Vestre Bokn; Implenia has joined a company called Stangeland to tunnel from Randaberg in the south, which is where I am. Both teams use multiple laser scans each day to consistently measure their orientation and check that the tunnel is exactly where it should be. The two ends should meet sometime in 2029, with no more than just a few centimeters of deviation.
为了加快进度，Rogfast 正从两端向中间推进。建筑公司 Skanska 从北部的 Vestre Bokn 岛开始施工；Implenia 则与 Stangeland 公司合作，从南部的兰达贝格（Randaberg）——也就是我所在的地方——进行挖掘。两支团队每天都使用多次激光扫描来持续测量方向，并确保隧道位置分毫不差。两端预计将在 2029 年左右贯通，偏差不会超过几厘米。
Norway has constructed more than a thousand kilometers of tunnels over the past several decades. The depth and length of these make the best efforts to date of Elon Musk’s Boring Company—a mere 2.7-kilometer tunnel in Las Vegas that is just 3.6 meters wide—look rather pathetic. The country’s spectacular setting makes such builds necessary; while Norwegians are proud of having the second-longest coastline in the world after Canada, getting up and down the west coast requires multiple ferry rides between islands, which can move extra slowly when the weather’s bad.
在过去的几十年里，挪威已经建造了超过一千公里的隧道。这些隧道的深度和长度，让埃隆·马斯克（Elon Musk）的“无聊公司”（Boring Company）迄今为止最好的成果——拉斯维加斯那条仅 2.7 公里长、3.6 米宽的隧道——看起来相当寒酸。挪威壮丽的地理环境使得这种建设成为必要；虽然挪威人以拥有仅次于加拿大的世界第二长海岸线而自豪，但沿着西海岸上下通行需要多次在岛屿间乘坐渡轮，而当天气恶劣时，渡轮的航行速度会变得极其缓慢。
After it’s completed, which is scheduled to happen in 2033, Rogfast should help eliminate two ferry routes and cut the five-hour journey between the southwestern cities of Stavanger and Bergen by 40 minutes. It will funnel four lanes of traffic deep beneath the fjords of Boknafjord and Kvitsøyfjord, and at one section a relatively scant 50 meters of rock will separate the drivers speeding through the tunnel from the bottom of the North Sea. There are also, delightfully, two undersea roundabouts located 220 meters below sea level.
Rogfast 预计将于 2033 年完工，届时它将取代两条渡轮航线，并将西南部城市斯塔万格（Stavanger）和卑尔根（Bergen）之间五小时的车程缩短 40 分钟。它将在博克纳峡湾（Boknafjord）和克维特索伊峡湾（Kvitsøyfjord）深处汇集四条车道，在其中一段，仅有 50 米厚的岩层将隧道中飞驰的司机与北海海底隔开。此外，令人惊喜的是，在海平面以下 220 米处还设有两座地下环岛。
The never-ending battle 永无止境的战斗
Subsea tunneling is defined by a constant, ultimately unwinnable battle with the ocean. The sheer weight of the sea above you, and the crushing pressure, means the water will always find a way in. “It’s the volume and the pressure that’s the biggest risk,” says Ole Magne Rønning…
海底隧道工程的定义就是与海洋进行一场持续不断、且最终无法彻底获胜的战斗。头顶上方海水的巨大重量和压碎一切的压力，意味着水总会找到渗入的途径。“水量和压力是最大的风险，”奥勒·马格内·罗宁（Ole Magne Rønning）说道……