The new Annacis water supply tunnel will be 4.5 meters in diameter and 2.3 kilometers long. It will contain inside a steel pipe of 2.6 meters in diameter. The new tunnel will replace one of the existing 5 tunnels and is meant to be better equipped against earthquakes and erosion of rivers.

The tunnel will be excavated via tunnel boring machine which will be lowered via a deep vertical shaft to start boring.

The contract that Metro Vancouver Regional District has awarded to McMillen Jacobs Associates is worth  CA$12.8 million and for the management of the project. Other bidders were SNC-Lavalin, Stantec Consulting and CDM Smith Canada. It is understood that the winning bid was not the cheapest one (it was CA$ 1m higher than the cheapest one). But the cheapest bider could not fulfill some requirements.

Implementation of the whole project will take 5 years.

image by: Mike from Vancouver, Canada [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)]