August 28 was an exciting day for the builders of the Hechi-Baise Expressway, as all 38 tunnels along the entire line were fully connected. Just days earlier, all 92 bridges across the project were also fully connected. These milestone victories in tunnel and bridge works have laid a solid foundation for ensuring the expressway's opening to traffic.
The Hechi-Baise Expressway has a total of 38 tunnels, including 32 on the main line, with a total length of 37.2 kilometers. The project passes through the mountainous areas of northwestern Guangxi, where geological conditions are complex and variable, crossing karst development zones with abundant surface water, posing high safety and stability risks. Since the project commenced, the Hechi-Baise Expressway has carried out tunnel management under the principle of "highlighting key points, overall optimization, balanced and rapid progress, and ensuring safety and quality," vigorously promoting standardized tunnel construction management, strictly implementing the admission and acceptance system for important materials, formwork, and lining trolleys, the first-piece engineering approval system, and applying and promoting new materials and new processes, effectively improving the durability of tunnel structures and the one-time pass rate of sampling inspections.
The main line of the Hechi-Baise Expressway features 92 bridges with a total length of 20.5 kilometers. Located in karst development areas with vertically connected caves, the project faces many difficulties in bridge construction. In the face of complex geological environments, the project carefully prepared implementation-based construction design plans according to the characteristics of different bridges, promoted complete sets of automated, intelligent, and large-scale construction equipment, and adopted new technologies and processes to ensure engineering quality. For bridge deck paving, suspended full-width pavers were used to complete concrete vibration and compaction, slurry extraction, scraping, and leveling in one pass, effectively improving the smoothness of bridge deck paving.
Currently, the subgrade, bridges, tunnels, and other works of the Hechi-Baise Expressway have all been connected; the asphalt lower layer is 97% complete, the asphalt middle layer is 87% complete, and the test sections for the asphalt upper layer in 6 contract sections have started paving; the main structures of building construction are over 95% complete; traffic safety engineering is 31% complete, landscaping is 53% complete, and electromechanical engineering has fully started and is advancing rapidly.