China plans to award a design-build contract soon for the sunken tube tunnel and artificial islands comprising part of the 30-kilometer-long, $5.5-billion road link between Hong Kong, Zhuhai and Macau, in the Pearl River Delta. Bids for the bridge section will follow in a few months, says a project source. Officials plan to open the link in 2016.

Road link across the Pearl River Delta will include a sunken tube tunnel and artificial islands.

From Hong Kong, some 5 km of bridges will link to two 700-meter-long islands, which will be linked by the tunnel. The crossing will continue on three cable-stayed bridges with spans from 280 m to 460 m. Viaducts will carry the link to Macau via another island. At 5.6 km, the tunnel will be 2 km longer than the world’s record-holder, the Denmark-Sweden Øresund, say engineers with COWI A/S, Copenhagen. With team leader China Highway Planning and Design Institute Consultants, COWI did preliminary design of the tunnel and islands. Arup Group, London, handled the design of some of the bridges.

Guangzhou-based Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge’s Advance Work Coordination Group Office (AWCGO) has a team of U.S., European and Chinese advisers. In July, says a source, it invited three teams to bid for the tunnel and islands. One of the teams, led by the contractor China Communications Construction Co. Ltd., Beijing, includes COWI and Arup.

To finance construction, the Chinese last year appointed a consortium led by Bank of China to secure $3.2 billion of debt. The governments of Guangdong, Hong Kong and Macau, which jointly established AWCGO, will pay the balance.