Hyundai Engineering & Construction (Hyundai E&C) held a ceremony on May 1 (local time) to mark the completion of the Kuwaiti Sheik Javert Causeway Marine Bridge, a construction project that spans 36.1 kilometers of the Gulf Coast on an artificial island in Kuwait Bay.
The ceremony was attended by Kuwait's King Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmad al-Sabah, as well as some 400 other key government figures, including Prime Minister Lee Nak-yon, to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the diplomatic ties between South Korea and Kuwait.
Hyundai E&C won the project for $2.62 billion in November 2013 after fierce competition with global competitors.
Of the total construction costs, Hyundai E&C accounted for 78 percent, or 2.1 trillion won, and is the largest overseas civil engineering project won by a South Korean builder since the 1984 Libyan waterway project.
The construction work, which lasted 66 months, was carried out in a fast-track method. The distance that used to take more than an hour and 10 minutes by car from the center of Kuwait City to the Subiya area can be covered within 20 minutes, which is expected to greatly contribute to the development of a balanced national territory through the development of new towns and ports in Subiya.
In order to install the world's largest 1,800-ton PC box girder using the FSLM method, it manufactured various special equipment such as floating crane and launching gantry and applied installation method suitable for depth of water.
In addition, two artificial islands measuring about 330,000 square meters (about 13 soccer stadiums) were constructed in the middle of the sea bridge.
Man-made islands built in the South and the North were constructed with facilities, including general management headquarters, anti-disaster maintenance, relief facilities, sewage treatment plants and substations for all living on the island.
In particular, it designed and constructed electric and telecommunication works of one 132kV substation and eleven 11kV substations, along with the ITS/SCADA, an intelligence-type traffic system, for all sections of 36.1km that was first introduced to the Kuwaiti road construction.
