Peter Behr, former manager and consultant for the Channel Tunnel project, discussed the process of building the tunnel and his involvement in it to about 50 people last night as part of this year's senior symposium.
The Channel Tunnel is an underwater tunnel linking England and France.
The Channel Tunnel project, Behr said, is "an example of what can be done ... it can certainly be done better, but to have done it at all is an accomplishment."
Behr's speech, held in 105 Dartmouth Hall, was titled "Linking England and France: 'The Chunnel.'"
Behr, who graduated from Stanford University in 1950, worked on the Channel Tunnel project until 1990 as an employee of Bechtel Corporation, an international engineering and construction company. After retiring in 1990, he continued to work as a consultant for the project until 1993. The Channel Tunnel project was completed in 1994.
The Channel Tunnel, Behr said, links the United Kingdom to all of Europe's railways and highway systems.
"It runs on a loop system from Folkestone [in the United Kingdom] to Calais [in France], and is 50 kilometers, 38 of those kilometers underwater," Behr said.
"The shuttles run platform to platform in about 35 minutes," he said "A full train can hold about 250 cars."
Behr discussed the Channel Tunnel's construction, noting that there are actually three tunnels -- two running tunnels and a smaller service tunnel.
"The service tunnel was done first," he said, "as a pilot tunnel, so that any problems would be with the smaller tunnel."
The tunneling was done with tunnel boring machines, he said.
The French named their TBM's, he said, citing Catherine, Brigette and Francois as a few examples.
"The British had much less imagination," Behr said. "They called their machines number one, number two, etc."
He said, the financial success of the venture is still up in the air. "The overall financial situation is clouded," he said.
Overall, Behr said, the Channel Tunnel project has been extremely successful.
"The operation is going well," he said. "We've captured 45 percent of the traffic from Dover to Calais."
"The tunnel is open and it's not going to close," Behr said. "It has 3,000 employees, and it's bi-national and bilingual."
Behr said the idea for the tunnel is not a 20th century one, but has been considered and attempted on and off since the beginning of the 19th century.
"The idea of a link between the British Isles and the continent has been around for a long time," he said.
"Napoleon was interested in building a tunnel back in 1802," Behr said, "but he got preoccupied with other projects."
He said there were several early attempts to build the tunnel, but digging did not begin until 1882 at Shakespeare Cliff in England.
The project was then abandoned for almost 100 years, he said, until digging started from both sides in 1974.
He said workers made several hundred meters progress from the British side before the project was again abandoned.
Feasibility studies in the early 1980s led to "an invitation to promoters in April 1985," Behr said. Four bids were evaluated closely, and CTG/FM, a consortium of the British Channel Tunnel Group and the French group France Marche, was finally awarded the project.
In August 1986, CTG/FM became Eurotunnel, but the project was not yet ready to go ahead.
"The initial capital was $500 million," Behr said, "but we needed legislative approval from both the United Kingdom and France to get the necessary financing."
Getting this approval was "easy in France, but hard in the United Kingdom, where there was still a great deal of opposition to the project," Behr said.
After much delay, the final financing amounted to $9 billion, he said. "That seemed like a lot of money, and it was, but we needed more financing later."
"They said it couldn't be done," the theme of this year's senior symposium, played itself out yet another time as coordinators of the symposium scrambled to find a speaker for last night's presentation.
The original speaker, Jack Lemley, recently informed the College that he could not attend due to an emergency, according to the Valley News.
An article in The Valley News last week publicized the unexpected cancellation.
This exposure led the College to Behr, who lives nearby in South Pomfret, Vt., who accepted the invitation to speak.
