Río Subterráneo a Lomas tunnel is a 13.5-kilometer-long tunnel in Buenos Aires, Argentina, which will transport drinking water from the newly expanded General Belgrano Water Treatment Plant in Bernal’s Quilmes area to the city of Lomas de Zamora.

Being the main element of the Agua Sur system, a water supply project in Argentina, the tunnel is the country’s largest water infrastructure project in the last 40 years. This new system will provide 2.5 million inhabitants in the Buenos Aires metropolitan area’s southern region access to freshwater.

For this significant project, Dextra supplied soft eyes reinforced with GFRP (Glass Fiber Reinforced Polymer) bars to facilitate the penetration of Tunnel Boring Machines (TBM) through a reinforcement cage.

The project required two boring machines to be launched and received from shafts. The tunnel was excavated at an average depth of 25 meters, starting with a curve with a radius of about 400 meters, and moving along a largely straight alignment, with a maximum slope of +/- 2 percent.

The first launch shaft is composed by 4 circular sectors that interconnected with each other in the bottom area. The total length of the shaft is around 45 meters long, 12 meters wide, and 25 meters high.

The whole project is anticipated to take approximately 10 years to complete.