All prefabricated box beams of eight bridges connecting south Du'an Yao autonomous county and the center part of Xiabu village, a major project of the Du'an-Bama Expressway, were completed on April 30.

Invested in and constructed by Guangxi Beibu Gulf Investment Group, Du'an-Bama Expressway is an important part of the expressways connecting Hezhou with Hechi. The main line is 119.129 kilometers long and the total investment budget is 16.55 billion yuan ($2.33 billion). It is one of the largest expressway EPC (Engineering, Procurement, Construction) projects in the country and is scheduled to be opened to traffic next year.

"In order to overcome the difficulty of labor shortages during the COVID-19 epidemic period and to catch up with the construction date, we recruited 120 local workers, which helped local residents find jobs, as well as eased the resumption of production and recruitment difficulties," said Wei Zhuang, deputy secretary of the first division of the Du'an-Bama Expressway.

To complete the construction tasks with high quality and on schedule, more than 1,000 workers joined in the first division to construct the interconnection of the Du'an South Hub on the basis of meeting safe production and effective COVID-19 epidemic prevention measures.

As of the end of April, the accumulative total investment of the Du'an-Bama Expressway reached about 1.02 billion yuan, accounting for 23 percent of the annual investment plan. It has completed a total investment of 9.86 billion yuan since the start of construction.