Tirana Times
TIRANA, May 10 – The Transport Ministry has confirmed that the Thirre tunnel, part of the Rreshen-Kalimash highway linking Albania to Kosovo will reopen on May 21 after eight months of being kept closed down because of reconstruction works.
Deputy Transport Minister Ernest Noka said the Thirre tunnel would be open to traffic starting from May 21 considering that most Kosovo citizens use the tunnel as the shortest way to come spend their summer holidays to Albania. According to Noka, reconstruction works in the tunnel are almost finished and the company is asphalting a one-kilometre segment where a partial collapse took place last year.
Meanwhile, officials of the US-Turkish Bechtel&Enka joint venture have called on Albanian police to help them by stopping circulation of all vehicles, even authorized ones, until May 21
The Thirre tunnel closed down last October to give the construction company time to finish installing electrical equipment and repair some strata of the tunnel risking to collapse.
Work on the 5.5 km tunnel began in May 2007 with all four faces being excavated concurrently to meet a tight construction program of two years.
The Rreshen-Kalimash road linking Albania to Kosovo, although not yet completed, was also inaugurated in an electoral stunt on June 26, 2009, by Prime Minister Berisha and his Turkish counterpart, Receep Tayyip Erdogan.
Albania’s largest public works project in decades, the four-lane highway is expected to strengthen the already deep ties between Albania and Kosovo. The highway has made travel much easier for hundreds of thousands of Kosovo residents who cross the border to take their summer holidays in Albania.
The road has been dubbed the “patriotic highway”, reflecting the widely perceived political and strategic motives behind the project.
The projected cost of the Rreshen-Kalimash highway stands at over one billion euros, more than double the original estimate of 416 million euros.
The 61-km motorway is the central link of the 171km (106 mile) motorway from the port city of Durres on the Adriatic, to Morine on the north-eastern border with Kosovo. Once complete, the new road is expected to cut travel times from Durres to Kosovo from six to two hours.
