Submerso project (Santos-Guarujá tunnel)

Description: The project calls for the construction and operation of an immersed tunnel between Brazil's coastal cities of Santos and Guarujá. To be submerged at a depth of 21m, the six-lane tunnel will give the Santos port navigation channel a draft of 17m. The project includes access roads that cover an approximate length of more than 6 km of road works, underground and on the surface viaducts, which connect the Macuco barrels in Santos and Vicente de Carvalho in Guarujá. The construction of the tunnel will be carried out using a technology that is not yet used in the country (submerged tunnel), but with a wide experience in Europe and other continents, which consists of dredging the bottom of the channel to open a trench to place prefabricated concrete modules, built in dry dock. Once built, the concrete modules, each 127m wide, will be towed by a float to the launch site where they will be immersed, seated in the channel bottom and joined to the other modules. This method avoids large volumes of excavations and allows the implantation of the road at low depths, which reduces the extent of access to the surface and facilitates the urban insertion of the project.