Yesterday and today, they’ve been lowering the giant cylindrical parts of the boring machine that will create the tunnel under Capitol Hill into the giant reinforced hole that will one day be the Capitol Hill station. All the wet dirt the tunnel displaces will be coming out of this hole. It’ll be wet because not only will the tunnel be underground, it’ll be underwater. The water table is higher in the ground in most places than the tunnel will be.
Fuckin’ engineers, man…how do they work?
(I never tire of that terrible joke. Sorry.)
From the title, I thought you were referring to The Stranger.
You’re a giant boring machine.
Just wondering how a straight writer might have tackled this item. XD
christopher, PLEASE stop dismissing all and everything as boring. you’re starting to sound all jaded like.
Is this for the light rail? I don’t know what the environmental implications are, but I like the idea of a straight shot from the ferry and downtown to Capitol Hill.
wait until you find out where the water table is near the Deep Bubbleator Tunnel they want to build for twice the price of surface plus transit along the waterfront – if the pumps and fans fail you have hours, not days.
stm for the jaded win.
Well gus, it’s not an elephant joke, but funny all the same…
(and good afternoon!)
I’m confused, is this the tunnel you guys like?
@9 yes. The cheaper voted for paid for tunnel that will add 14,000 daily riders from that station alone.
something about gaping holes being nothing new on Capitol Hill…
Canuck, hello! How nice to meet today over this photo of the giant pit outside Christopher’s apartment window!
I would prefer we were meeting over Campari sodas at a cafe in Rome, but I guess we take what we get, gus dear…although I’m sure you could come up with a pun or two to make the scenery worthwhile.
Canuck – one of my colleagues is heading to Italy in a couple of weeks – her bf lived in Rome for a year – enjoy the sun!
Then I’m very jealous, Will. It’s pretty much the opposite of Italy in Calgary right now 🙁
Canuck, it’s not the Via Veneto, but it’ll have to do.
@15 are you guys still underwater like Winnipeg? how many metres now?
Close, gus, but missing that certain something…
Will, no, we’re not underwater, nothing like the Red River situation here, but spring is late and the snowpack is huge, so if it melts fast, we could have some pretty bad flooding, but nothing like Manitoba. (A Chinese proverb says a wise man builds his house on a hill…)
@7 Will
The U-Link goes under water through the Montlake Cut.
Hmmm, no cost or cost overrun information.
@7, and the BART goes under earthquake prone San Francisco Bay.
It may be beneath the perched water table, but the entire tunnel pathway may not traverse saturated soils.
The really, really big tunnel boring machines — bigger than Sound Transit’s but smaller than the one WSDOT will use to dig SR 99 under downtown Seattle — are pictured at http://www.megamachine.info/2010/05/herr….