Inside China’s Crazy Plan to Build the Longest, Most Expensive, Most Dangerous Underwater Tunnel on the Planet
13th July 2013
Deep beneath the Bohai Sea, Chinese engineers may soon begin boring the longest submarine tunnel on the planet. At an estimated 76 miles (123km) long, it would surpass the combined length of world’s two longest underwater tunnels—Japan’s Seikan Tunnel and the Channel Tunnel between the UK and France. To connect the bustling northern ports of Dalian and Yantai, the engineers will have to tunnel through two fault zones that have caused a slew of deadly earthquakes in the last century. And the project will cost a whopping $42.4 billion, nearly three times as expensive as Boston’s Big Dig.
Well, Big Dig cost what it did because of corruption and incompetence on the part of successive Taxachussetts Democratic administrations, and however bad Chinese authoritarianism might be, they still have a ways to catch up to the Democrats.