Two 1,800-meter-long tunnels, an important part of the south-to-north water diversion project, were completed June 19 in Gangtou, about 30 kilometers from Baoding of Hebei Province.

A project manager at the site said they had worked on the tunnels for eight months, and will now focus on concrete pouring.

Water experts said that the success of these tunnels will push the construction of the Shijiazhuang-Beijing section or even the whole central routes into full swing.

The Shijiazhuang-Beijing section was launched at the end of 2003 to supply water to Beijing from the central part of north China's Hebei Province. The water supply canal will divert water from four big reservoirs in the Taihang Mountain areas in Hebei to Beijing for use in the event of an acute water shortage.

Actually, this section is an emergency part of the middle route of the South-to-North Water Diversion Project designed to take water from a Yangtze River branch in Hubei Province to north China through the provinces of Henan and Hebei.

As a key part of middle route, the 307-kilometre-long Beijing-Shijiazhuang section is designed to link four reservoirs in Hebei with Beijing to help ease possible water shortage in China's capital city before the 2008 Olympics.

Upon its completion next year, the 17 billion yuan (US$2 billion) Beijing-Shijiazhuang section is expected to carry 400 million cubic meters of water per year from the Gangnan, Huangbizhuang, Yukuai and Xidayang reservoirs in Hebei to Beijing, according to local water experts.

Huangbizhuang Reservoir in Hebei Province

The south-to-north water diversion project consists of three canals, each running more than 1,000 kilometers across the eastern, central and western parts of the country.

The three routes are designed to divert water from the upper, middle and lower reaches of the water-rich Yangtze River to the country's drought-prone north.

The middle route will take water from the Danjiangkou Reservoir in central China's Hubei Province into large cities including Beijing, Tianjin, Shijiazhuang and Zhengzhou.

The eastern route is designed to transfer water from east China's Jiangsu Province on the Yangtze River into Tianjin mainly along the Beijing-Hangzhou Grant Canal.

Specific details about the western line are yet to be finalized with some experts still pushing for its engineering preliminaries in recent years.

Upon its completion scheduled around 2050, the entire project involving nearly 500 billion yuan (US$61.6 billion), is capable of delivering 44.8 billion cubic meters of water into the parched north each year.

(China Daily June 19, 2006)