Inslee and his new WSDOT secretary should use this as an opportunity to clean house at WSDOT - get rid of the Highways Ãœber Alles people that brought us such disasters as the cracked 520 pontoons and the broken boring machine. Now's the time to abandon the waterfront tunnel project, use the unspent money to save and expand Metro service, and focus on making sure WSDOT doesn't use any more ridiculously flawed traffic projections to justify megaprojects they can't handle.
@4. Please run for office. You totally get how it all this works, clearly. I mean, maybe WSDOT can just do a wire transfer to KC Metro? And that Viaduct is good for another 50 years, right? It's all good!
Who cares? Why is Slog so obsessed with this fucking tunnel digger? It's underground, out of the way, and doesn't bother anyone. I'm way more concerned why the Mercer improvements are taking YEARS and fuck up my life every time I try to get on I-5.
i agree with @10 that they HAVE an idea what the problem is - a steel well casing that's already contacted the curring head and is no longer vertical. they just don't know specifically what the fix is.
shit happens. tunnel construction is hard. they don't want anyone to die. i hope that's ok with you.
Erica's got a good working theory: "Bad news about "Bertha" is inversely proportional to the cutesiness of WSDOT's proclamations about it—I mean, "her."" http://www.seattlemet.com/news-and-profi…
I don't think Sloggers are necessarily obsessed with the tunnel digger. Generally we're obsessed with typing our pointless two cents into the comment thread. But hey, maybe a post about the Mercer improvements will prove me wrong.
What @13 said. They clearly know what's wrong. A vertical pipe is barring the tunneling machine, but the tunneling machine itself is not vertical, so after evaluating all options, they've decided to send down humans to remove the pipe. It ain't that hard to figure out. This is a country where people get things done. When your copy machine gets jammed, do you all just start crying and go home?
@16: See how the people who know about the machine (WSDOT) don't say that that's the problem? And how they're sending down divers to diagnose the problem? Which will take weeks just to set up the ground so that the divers can start to look? That rather strongly implies this is not a case of a single pipe.
The project is NOT at a standstill. They are still working on the north and south approaches to the tunnel, work that can continue even if the tunnel machine is not tunneling.
@11, fuck mercer. That money was supposed to go to a lander overpass to mitigate for stadium traffic in the maritime industrial sector in sodo. then Paul Allen convinced nickels that he deserved the cash to improve his neighborhood? Anyway shouldn't you mercer folks all be riding the slut or fixed gear bikes or something anyway?
Sooo, following this analogy, I think it's time to say fuck doctors and pick up some organic cranberry juice which will clear up that UTI right away for a couple dollars with no side effects.
If that wasn't clear for whatever reason, organic cranberry juice is the surface/transit option.
@25 Had Nickles not passive-aggressively scuttled the Monorail project, surface/transit would have been organic cranberry juice washing down a big wad of Keflex. Funny how all the 99 replacement plans didn't begin to be discussed seriously until just a few months after the demise of the monorail.
FTA: "They found clues, including part of an 8-inch-diameter steel pipe inside the machine's excavation chamber."
Seems to me they just(?) need to pull out the other part(s) of the half chewed pipe. It's like when your paper shredder gets jammed up. It's just paper, but it can be enough.
SEE WHAT I DID THERE.
Trust #6, he's referenced Foucault in the past. Although I liked the joke, though the SEE WHAT I DID THERE could have been left out, either way.
Read Bertha's twitter feed. The tone was fine, I guess, when things were going well but now that they aren't she's reminding me of HAL.
shit happens. tunnel construction is hard. they don't want anyone to die. i hope that's ok with you.
I don't think Sloggers are necessarily obsessed with the tunnel digger. Generally we're obsessed with typing our pointless two cents into the comment thread. But hey, maybe a post about the Mercer improvements will prove me wrong.
Early on in the non-boring episode of clusterfuckia, it was reported that Bertha was off course. Has anything more been said about this?
If that wasn't clear for whatever reason, organic cranberry juice is the surface/transit option.
Seems to me they just(?) need to pull out the other part(s) of the half chewed pipe. It's like when your paper shredder gets jammed up. It's just paper, but it can be enough.