What do you find so fascinating about the Gotthard Tunnel?
Well for one thing, the mountain itself: Gotthard is legendary. It forms a huge barrier, a weather divide, on one side of it there's rain, on the other sun. It's the cultural border between northern and southern Europe. And for the Swiss themselves, the mountain has great symbolic value. When we were filming we met a Swiss guy who was walking right across the country - and obviously right over the Gotthard as well.
And of course then there's the tunnel itself: a once-in-a-lifetime project! The Gotthard base tunnel alone is 57 kilometers long. A world record! If you add the Ceneri base tunnel, the distance comes to 72 kilometers right through the Alps, always in a straight line. From 2019 onwards, the train from Zurich to Milan will not even take three hours. A flat track, running right through these enormous rocks - it's completely unbelievable!
And what does the project have to do with Allianz?
Allianz Suisse is an insurance partner of AlpTransit AG that is building the Gotthard and Ceneri base tunnels. It's an extremely complex project: we have hardly anything to compare it to. With a construction time of 20 years, it's practically impossible to estimate what the risks will be by the end of the policy. The technology alone is continually changing, some devices are even constructed just for this tunnel. Clearly the question for Allianz is,: how can you insure something like that?
Allianz Suisse, primarily Beat Guggisberg and his team, are continually on hand, working together with the engineers and construction companies as equal partners. They are collaborating on the planning, acting as a sort of continual safety advisor for the entire project. At the same time, the policy is being continually adjusted to take account of any new developments. You could say that there's a genuine symbiosis between the building site and our risk managers.