The veil comes down for the second of the giganO moles that will be used on the Webuild construction sites for the construction of the Messina-Catania high-capacity line in Sicily. The “green” tricolor giant, which adopts the most advanced technologies in terms of environmental sustainability and has a diameter of 9.36 meters and a weight of approximately 900 tons, has in fact successfully passed the final tests in the factory.
The mole is now ready to contribute to the construction of part of the Palermo-Messina-Catania line – commissioned by Rete Ferroviaria Italiana, lead company of the Infrastructure Hub of the FS Italiane Group – which will support sustainable infrastructural development in the region, enhancing the speed and effectiveness of the transport of goods and people within the island. The Tunnel Boring Machine – TBM – will therefore be dismantled in the next few days, and with a special transport, will travel to Sicily, in the Webuild sites, where it is expected to arrive in January next year. A team of technicians will reassemble all its components. The TBM is an extremely innovative giant mole that digs into the ground thanks to a milling head, but it is also a mobile factory: during excavation, it also mounts the linings in parallel, large rings made up of prefabricated ashlars which stabilize the ground and make so that after the passage of the TBM, the tunnel is practically ready.
Over the last 50 years, the Webuild Group has installed around 200 TBMs, building over 1,500 kilometers of tunnels. Webuild’s focus on sustainability in Sicily goes hand in hand with that of innovation, in collaboration and for the benefit of a local supply chain of excellence. Webuild is in fact building a fully automated and robotized factory in Belpasso, Catania, for the production of the segments that will line the tunnels of the two lots on the Catania-Messina route. The first of its kind in Italy, the factory will be able to produce a segment every 7 minutes (compared to 10 minutes in the absence of total automation).
On the Palermo-Catania-Messina route, Webuild is engaged in the construction of seven lots, together with other Italian companies: in addition to the new Fiumetorto-Lercara Branch Lot, on the Palermo-Catania line it is building the Bicocca-Catenanuova and Nuova Enna-Dittaino sections, to which the Caltanissetta Xirbi-Nuova Enna and the Lercara-Caltanissetta Xirbi were added more recently, while on the Messina-Catania line, it is building the Taormina-Giampilieri and Fiumefreddo-Taormina/Letojanni lots. Overall, the construction of these seven lots is estimated to lead to the creation of 7,300 jobs, both direct and third-party, with the involvement of around 800 companies from the start of the works to date.
