METRO VANCOUVER — Metro Vancouver has announced construction is substantially finished on the Second Narrows Water Supply Tunnel.
The tunnel lies 30 metres below the bottom of the Burrard Inlet, east of the Ironworkers Memorial Bridge, between Burnaby and the District of North Vancouver. It was excavated through a variety of ground conditions using a slurry tunnel boring machine, a release described, and replaces three watermains built between the 1940s and the 1970s that are vulnerable to damage during an earthquake and are nearing the end of their service lives.
The new water supply tunnel is 6.5 metres in diameter, just over one kilometre long, and contains three new steel watermains which are designed to withstand a one-in-10,000-year earthquake.
They are also capable of delivering more than one million litres of drinking water every day to Vancouver, Burnaby, Richmond, New Westminster, Delta and parts of Coquitlam and Surrey.
“Building this tunnel under the Burrard Inlet was a massive project and is another great example of the critical infrastructure that Metro Vancouver delivers for this region,” said Mike Hurley, chair of Metro Vancouver’s Board of Directors, in a statement. “For a sense of scale, this tunnel was large enough to drive a truck through — and now it holds three separate watermains that will increase capacity and ensure we can continue supplying water following a major earthquake.”
With the tunnel now substantially complete, Metro Vancouver will start connecting the new watermains to the existing water supply system, the release notes. Work on these tie-ins will occur on both sides of the Burrard Inlet, and each connection is expected to take several months to complete.
The tunnel is expected to be fully in service by 2028.
Metro Vancouver has also begun restoring Second Narrows Park (also known as Montrose Park), where work took place on the Burnaby side.
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