International competition ITA Tunnelling and Underground Space Awards seeks and rewards the most ground-breaking innovation and outstanding projects in tunnelling and underground space use. After a challenging year, especially on safety issues, the event went digital and awarded the best achievements in the industry, through eight different categories.

ITA reflected on the past year, announcing that despite the challenges the awards still received 52 entries from 23 countries. ITA complemented the way all the innovations, projects, engineers and companies work together to make the industry more resilient and ready to take on new challenges.

The Major Project of the Year was awarded to John Holland CPB Ghella Joint Venture Tunnelling and Station Excavation Works for the Sydney Metro City & Southwest Project. Sydney Metro is Australia's biggest public transport project. The City & Southwest project aims to extend the Metro North West rail line from Chatswood through to the Sydney CBD and beyond to Bankstown.

It is Australia's first project to have five tunnel boring machines (TBMs) building tunnels simultaneously including under iconic Sydney Harbour and through the congested underground CBD environment, while roadheaders created some of the largest caverns in Australia.

Many achievements were implemented for this massive project such as: two dives and permanent portal structures, three underground mined stations, one crossover cavern, three open station boxes, three shafts and one tanked station box structure. Impressive works were also operated with the excavation of two twin 15.5km fully lined tunnels between Chatswood and Marrickville with 57 cross passages.

Image via ITA.