The OHL Group, Potencia Award for Public Work Machinery and Civil Engineering 2013

At the Seventh edition of the Potencia Awards for Public Work Machinery and Civil Engineering 2013 (Premios Potencia de Maquinaria de OP e Ingeniería Civil 2013), held by the Spanish publication “Potencia” and Spanish publishing group TPI, the OHL Group has been distinguished with the top award in the category of Urban Construction, in recognition its application of “innovative, effective and low-environmental impact solutions” to the Link between Gdansk Airport and the Port of Gdansk – Trasa Slowackiego IV project in Poland.

The awards ceremony was held this past 20 November in Madrid and brought together over 200 guests, representatives from civil engineering and construction companies in addition to public work machinery manufacturers and distributors, who gathered together among the awardees of the six convened categories: Tunnels, Roadways, Bridges and Dams, Urban Construction, Demolition and, for the first time, Mining.

The conferral of this award is recognition of OHL’s commitment to applying technological innovation in its projects. In particular, with this link between the airport and port of the Polish city of Gdansk, OHL has become the first Spanish company to undertake tunnel making with the use of a hydroshield tunnel boring machine, whose characteristics make it an effective tool for working where the geological conditions of the terrain are likely to be highly unstable under excavation or where there is combination of geological conditions with the prevailing granularity bearing an elevated volume of water.

The work completed by the OHL team in Gdansk, comprising José Miguel Fernández, Janusz Sokolnicki and Alexey Pryadko, contemplates the construction of a 2.4 km stretch of a four-lane bypass road and the execution of two twin tunnels spanning 1,100 m with an inner diameter of 12 m under the navigation channel of the Vistula river. This project is part of the corridor that will connect the highway toward Warsaw with the airport and the Port of Gdansk, considered to be the most important port infrastructure in the Baltic Sea and the primary hub of Eastern Europe.