Short blog entry today.
“SMART is an acronym for Stormwater Management and Road Tunnel, a project under the Federal Government initiated to alleviate the flooding problem in the city centre of Kuala Lumpur.” It was featured on the National Geographic Channel.
The main touted feature of the SMART tunnel is that it is a dual use tunnel. In normal mode, it’s a road tunnel. If there is a need to divert water away from Kuala Lumpur to prevent flooding, then the tunnel gets converted to a big stormwater tunnel. When the situation gets better, its converted back to a road tunnel.
My question is: how do they clean up the mud and gunk that is carried into the tunnel with the stormwaters prior to putting it into road tunnel mode? Is it a manual job, or is automated?
I reckon the use a really large fans (ie a blow drier) might work or maybe even a large vacum cleaner to suck up all mud.
Alternalively you could ‘pig’ the tunnel with super large sponge.
I think the super large sponge is the way to go. I don’t see any vacuum ports along the side of the tunnel. Also, there’s a big building near the Bukit Bintang tunnel entrance.
Sponge?
You just get 200 foreign workers (country witheld) with 200 tiny little sponges to do the job.
Mud wrestling for next two weeks until the contestants mop up all the mud.