New tunnel to be built instead of reconstructing Crnaja tunnel on the Jablanica-Konjic road

SARAJEVO, (Patria) - The Government of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina accepted the information on activities to resolve the issue of the Crnaja tunnel, on the M-17 main road, section Jablanica – Konjic and gave consent for the implementation of the variant involving the construction of a new tunnel.

Funds for the construction of the new tunnel will be provided from the own resources of the Public Enterprise Roads of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, or from grant funds of the Government of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, or from credit funds through the reallocation of existing ones.

As stated in the information, the Crnaja tunnel was built in the 1960s on terrain with serious geological and hydrogeological problems due to the presence of an active landslide, which are also the reasons for the poor condition of the road structure, tunnel lining, reduced clearance of the light profile, and as such has long posed a serious threat to the normal flow of traffic.

Following the bad experience with the Vranduk tunnel reconstruction project and the position of the Government of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina that works on the reconstruction of the Crnaja tunnel must not begin without an alternative traffic flow, the already signed contract with the contractor, with a contractual value of 12,833,631.32 KM including VAT, was suspended and additional analyses were undertaken to find possibilities for completely diverting traffic from the tunnel.
This solution would allow the execution of works in the tunnel to be significantly accelerated, which directly reduces the deadline for the execution of works compared to the contract, and at the same time traffic would flow without major delays.

For these reasons, several variant solutions for the reconstruction of the tunnel under traffic were developed, including the construction of bypasses of various lengths, and a variant for the construction of a new tunnel 963 meters long. Based on the conceptual designs, it was determined that the estimated costs of reconstructing the Crnaja tunnel in variants with a bypass range from 20.6 to 22.4 million KM, while the costs of constructing a new tunnel are estimated at 27.7 million KM. Based on the prepared Study on the comparison of variant solutions, the position of the Public Enterprise Roads of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina is that the most favorable variant is the construction of a new tunnel and the associated section of the route, i.e., the variant with the lowest total costs and the least risks for traffic participants.