At 2pm on May 11, 2001, after 11 hours of excavation in a dark tunnel, construction chief Lien Shan-chu (連三祝) finally dug out his colleague Lin Tzu-yi's (林子益) body.
Lin died at 1am when he made his usual inspection visit to the tunnel. He was buried under rocks and mud from a sudden mudslide that had been touched off by sprouting groundwater.
PHOTO: GEORGE TSORNG, TAIPEI TIMES
Lin's curled torso and purple face was a painful sight etched in Lien's memory.
PHOTO: GEORGE TSORNG, TAIPEI TIMES
"He choked to death," Lien recalled in a flat voice. "His children are just in elementary school, but they already lost their father."
In his thirteen years of construction work in the sunless Hsuehshan Tunnel (
"What can you say? This is the risk we construction workers and engineers knew about when we chose our professions. We feel sad, but we don't complain," Lien said as he directed reporters through a narrow, muddy track inside the dimly lit tunnel.
"We want to see the tunnel broken through more than anybody else," Lin said, wiping his hands on his mud-spattered slacks. "After all, it's been thirteen years. My daughters who were then elementary school kids are now university graduates."
The widely publicized Hsueh-shan Tunnel is set for an official opening on Thursday.
As the world's fifth-longest highway tunnel, the Hsuehshan Tunnel was never going to be an easy project.
When the consulting team of foreign experts visited the site in 1999, they said the project was harder than most European tunnels. Given the length of the tunnel and the complex geology it passes through, the foreign advisors predicted that project would be completed in 2011 at the earliest.
Unexpectedly difficult formations of brittle and abrasive rocks and massive inflows of groundwater have put off the project's completion date four times.
"The sandstone we encountered is six times harder than concrete. It took us eight years to drill forward 3km in the sandstone area," said Chang Winson (
Only 12 percent of the work had been completed when the original 1999 completion date passed.
"The geological formation was extremely complex," Chang said.
The whole 385km-long island is the result of a tectonic collision between at least two giant crustal plates: the Eurasian and the Philippine Sea plates. The tunnel project area at the northern end of the island features some of the oldest rocks, such as sandstone, argillite, shale and quartzite.
The first 4km inward from the eastern portals hits the Kankou Formation of several fault zones within shale formations. The arduous job of excavation included numerous collapses.
Often, the whole construction site was either buried in mudslides or submerged in water gushing out from underground under high pressure.
Despite the geological obstacles and the frustration of delays, the Hsuehshan Tunnel's saga is approaching a happy ending.
"We will see the final breakthrough in the tunnel on September 16. By the end of next year, people can travel from Taipei to Ilan in 30 minutes," said Lin Ling-shan (
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