I'm Fiona Warren and I'm the Development Manager on the Western Distributor project.

So, the Western Distributor project is made up of various things.

The first part of the project is the widening of the West Gate Freeway. Those two additional lanes will be used to feed a new tunnel. The tunnel under Yarraville will come up in the industrial area and go up and over the Maribyrnong River and then remain elevated until it connects in with CityLink and the city of Melbourne.

There's a lot different types of construction that will form part of this project. So we've got the West gate Freeway widening which will be a very complex part of the project in that it will be done under live and heavy traffic.

Then I guess the most exciting and interesting part of the project is the tunnelling. We anticipate we'll be using tunnel boring machines that are purpose-built for the tunnels. So they are built for this project and they end their life on this project.

So, once they do actually start boring under the ground, they'll be working 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. They move approximately 20 metres every day. Most people that are living above the tunnel, even during construction, won't know something's happening below their home.

As the tunnel boring machine's going through ground there will be another crew of people coming through and actually constructing the concrete lining of the tunnel, in behind it.

So once this tunnel boring machine is on its journey under Yaraville, by the time it comes out the other end there'll be a fairly complete tunnel siting behind it.

So the reason why we have chosen to build a tunnel in this location is to avoid all the impacts that would happen at the surface if you did build a surface road. A lot of what we are doing from a design perspective is working out how we can get the trucks and cars to use this facility safely together.

There's standards that exist for the amount of vibration that is allowed from this type of operation. So we'll be designing both the tunnel boring machine and the distances below the surface to ensure that's met. Then to ensure that is met during construction, there will be monitoring at the surface. We do have the ability to change that and make sure it is kept within standards.

Taking the trucks from the local roads and putting them in a purpose-built tunnel is going to allow those streets that are currently being used as heavy vehicle routes to return back to the community.

The corridor coming in from the west is the West Gate Freeway. It relies very heavily on the West Gate Bridge. During construction the same number of lanes that exist today will be kept available during the peak periods. There will be periods overnight or outside of peak times where we will be reducing the number of lanes. But that will only be done when the traffic flows can cater for that reduced number of lanes.

So at the moment we're doing a lot of what we refer to as due diligence work, which means we're actually going out there and sampling the ground where we anticipate the tunnel will be constructed.

And we anticipate it's going to be a four to five year build. It will be a long build period. We'll make that as easy as possible on the community and there's a lot of things that we put in place and requirements we put on our contractors.

So I'm not only involved with our technical people in design and traffic and planning and procurement but I also get involved in the community sessions.

People are genuinely excited about the project and can really see the benefits this project is going to bring to them personally, as a community and even to the broader west area.

I'm very proud to set it up in a way that the design and construction companies are going to be able to build something they're proud of too.