The training course was organized on behalf of the ITA-AITES Saudi Arabia member nation and the municipality of Riyadh. Its aim was to provide a general overview of the main types of common utility.
The population and the footprint of the city of Riyadh is rapidly growing (1200km2, pop. 5’000’000+), the municipality of the city is pursuing several leads in order to adapt its common infrastructures; the development of a network of utility tunnels is one of them.
The program of the training session was organized to provide neutral information whether a network of utility tunnels is adapted to the current and future situation of the city of Riyadh.
H.E eng. Al-Mogbel, Mayor of Riyadh and President of the ITACET Foundation gave the opening speech and welcomed the numerous participants.
The audience was constituted of a large panel of interested professional among them officials of the technical services of the city of Riyadh, consultants, engineers and contractor’s delegates.
Following the welcome speech, an introduction on the situation in Saudi Arabia cities were given by a senior official of the municipality of Riyadh.
After this very informative introduction the two ITA-AITES lecturers, namely, Messer Charles-Edouard Delpierre (F - GDF SUEZ) and Jan Sochurek (CZ - Interprojekts sc Ingutis ltd) took the floor to give first an overview on utility tunnels and then several lectures on Creating and Identifying Opportunities, Decision Making and Design Issues.
During the last session, two companies’ delegates, Messer Bodo Kern (D - Herrenknecht AG) and Ciaran Mahood (D - PORR Bau GmbH) presented several past and ongoing case studies on tunneling works in Saudi Arabia.
The 160 participants who followed the two-day course were also given the opportunities to interact with the lecturers, lively open discussion were held at the end of each day at this extent.
Aside the training session, the lecturers also participated to working meetings with the Mayor of Riyadh and several senior official of the technical services of the city, this to give them accurate information on specific points related to utility tunnels.
As mentioned by several participants, this training session established an excellent dynamic between the lecturers and the audience, this dynamic was reinforced by the perspective of future construction of utility tunnels in Riyadh.
The Promotional poster of the event is available to download >>
Pictures, L. to R. courtesy of Mr. Jan Sochurek
H.E eng. Abdullah Al-Mogbel, Mayor of Riyadh during his welcoming speach to participants.
The opening allocution of the training session welcomed 160 participants.
ITA Lecturers
