At mid-morning on a Tuesday in February, few passengers have a coffee in the scandlines ferry crossing from Germany to Denmark through the Fehmarn Strait in the Baltic Sea. The tourist season is still far away and most travelers are truck drivers who make the route from central Europe to Scandinavia. The 45-minute journey flies by between admiring the landscape and visiting a cafe, restaurant and shop duty free of the modern ferry that sails every half hour to cover the 18 kilometers that separate both countries. If the deadlines are met, in 2029 this route, the last bottleneck between central and northern Europe, can be done by train or by car.
Denmark finances one of the largest infrastructures currently under construction in the European Union: the Fehmarn tunnel, an immense engineering work budgeted at 7,100 million euros to connect two countries and two European regions and close the gap that now prevents the north- south by rail. The project, highly controversial on the German side, consists of what is known as a submerged tunnel. Instead of drilling under the seabed, a trench about 15 meters deep is dug on which 89 prefabricated concrete and steel structures will be placed, which will fit together like Lego pieces to make up the tunnel. It will be the longest of its kind in the world, says the consortium in charge of its construction.
On Fehmarn, Germany’s third largest island and one of the popular tourist destinations on the Baltic coast, they feel that the big fish has eaten the little one. Faced with a project supported by the German Government and the European Commission —which provides funding within the Connect Europe mechanism to promote transport infrastructure—, the municipality of 12,000 inhabitants is powerless against what is coming their way.
“We are going to live with four major works on the island over the next decade,” laments the mayor, Jörg Weber. He is referring to the tunnel, the widening of the highway from two to four lanes, a new railway that will cross the island and another tunnel that will connect it to the mainland. “It will be noisy, it will change our landscape and it will affect traffic to and from Fehmarn. And we are concerned about the acceptance of tourists, ”he adds.
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The consortium that builds the tunnel ensures that it tries to generate the minimum impact on the territory. It has fauna observers on staff who sound the alarm if any bird is affected by the construction and stores the layers of fertile soil that have been removed in what will be the tunnel entrance to put them back in the same place when finished. . Once the portal is built, farmers will be able to grow crops above the tunnel again. But the affectation to the landscape is inevitable. On the German side, some 200 meters have been reclaimed from the sea and a few meters further on, a beach has been rebuilt where mountains and mountains of sand extracted from the seabed now accumulate. On the other side, on the Danish island of Lolland, the area under construction is at least five times larger, but the project is viewed favorably there. It will bring work and tourism, its mayor told the Frankfurter Allgemeine: “With the tunnel we are no longer in the extreme south of Denmark, but in the middle of the metropolises of Hamburg and Copenhagen”.
From the ferry, you can see how the work is progressing: along the route, four dredger boats extract materials from the seabed and load them onto barges that transport them to shore. Construction started at the end of last year on the German side, on the island of Fehmarn, later than on the Danish island of Lolland, because environmental associations, ferry companies and the Fehmarn City Council, among others, tried to stop the project in the courts. They are concerned about how the construction of a tunnel that will house a highway with four lanes for vehicles, two in each direction, and two railways for high-speed passenger and freight trains, could affect the island’s marine environment and ecosystem.
The Fehmarn tunnel will be the longest road and rail tunnel in the world, say the explanatory panels of the visitor center that the company has opened in Rodbyhavn, south of the island of Lolland, 160 kilometers from the capital, Copehnague. The star of the exhibition is a model that shows, among other things, how the 217-meter-long prefabricated modules will leave the port and will be towed until they are submerged at the exact point to form the tunnel. The factory that will build them occupies the equivalent of 140 football fields and is on the Danish side. You can already see the structure of the first of the six production lines. When it is operational it will employ several thousand workers and will be one of the largest workplaces in Denmark.
The project to build a fixed connection between Germany and Denmark that would improve the trans-European transport networks had been haunting both countries for decades. Various ideas have been floated since the 1980s, including an excavated tunnel and a bridge. Ultimately, it was decided that the submerged tunnel was the best option based on the characteristics of the strait, explains Martin Staffel, the chief engineer responsible for the construction, on site. Berlin and Copenhagen signed a treaty to build the infrastructure in 2008. It is Denmark that contributes the 7.1 billion, of which 1,000 is actually a budget cushion in case cost overruns occur. Once built, the tunnel will be paid for only through tolls.
“The biggest difficulty of the project is logistics: coordinating boats, trucks, excavators… so that everyone is in their place at all times,” says Staffel. The engineer has built bridges, tunnels and highways around the world – he worked on large infrastructures such as the Qatar metro and the high-speed train between Beijing and Shanghai – but he says that directing the works on the tunnel that will link his country, Germany, with neighboring Denmark, is one of the biggest challenges of his career.
The company has 70 ships working at the same time, which adds to the usual heavy maritime traffic in this area. “30,000 boats a year sail through the Fehmarn Strait; all Baltic traffic passes through here on its way to the North Sea,” says Erling Olsen, manager of the maritime operations center. His job is to direct all those routes and avoid accidents. On land, 90 trucks load materials from one place to another 24 hours a day. Among them, granite rocks that have had to be imported -also by ship- from Norway for the new port’s dam.
It’s all big numbers at the Fehmarn tunnel works. The goal is that by 2029 it will take seven minutes to cross by train and 10 by car, and to ensure that crossing will always be possible, regardless of weather conditions. It is not clear what the future will be for the ferry from which Staffel proudly points to the Magnor, the largest backhoe dredger in the world, in the process of tearing up sand from the bottom with a huge yellow hydraulic arm. Those responsible for Scandlines assure that they will continue sailing, with or without a tunnel.
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