Seattle tunnel machine still stalled by mystery blockage
SEATTLE (AP) - The huge machine drilling a highway tunnel under downtown Seattle remains stalled by a mysterious blockage.
A spokeswoman for the state Transportation Department, KaDeena Yerkan, says Thursday we probably won't know anything new until after the first of the year.
Wells have been pumping out water so that workers might be able to identify the obstruction that halted progress on Dec. 7.
The machine called Bertha is about 60 feet under Seattle streets and about one-tenth of the way toward completing a 1.7-mile tunnel. It will carry Highway 99 traffic and allow the demolition of the Alaskan Way Viaduct on the waterfront.
A spokeswoman for the state Transportation Department, KaDeena Yerkan, says Thursday we probably won't know anything new until after the first of the year.
Wells have been pumping out water so that workers might be able to identify the obstruction that halted progress on Dec. 7.
The machine called Bertha is about 60 feet under Seattle streets and about one-tenth of the way toward completing a 1.7-mile tunnel. It will carry Highway 99 traffic and allow the demolition of the Alaskan Way Viaduct on the waterfront.
Drilling is full of unexpected events. Some surprises can compromise the whole job. Using a good contractor, they can foresee most of these problems.
http://www.blackdogdrilling.com/
Turn that Hubble space telescope-thingy around and point it at Seattle. Hubble can image galaxies back to the beginning of time.. surely it can find what's ailing Bertha!
Its the new Boeing contract stalling this baby.
Cripes.....I'm just weeping over all the antique bottles and other old stuff from the 19th century that they are just plowing through and crushing. Some of those old bottles are worth tons. When they did a big construction project down in Madison Park by the Arboretum, they accidentally dug right into all the fill that was dumped there in the late 1800's and early 1900's. I took a few days off work at City People's just so I could collect all the bottles and other good stuff coming up out of that old dump. Sold a lot of them on Ebay for lots of money as many were very rare Seattle bottles. I hate thinking of all those old bottles and other antiques being buried down there and then getting smooshed by Bertha. They are basically digging through where Denny Hill used to be. Do a search on the Denny Hill removal sometime. It's fascinating! What is blocking Bertha is probably the Arkenstone of Denny Hill. They forgot to remove it when they killed Denny Hill!
It has hit a buried alien craft, this is the SHTF moment, someone call Tom Cruise and Bruce Willis
They ran into an existing secret tunnel connecting secret underground facilities.
GODZILLA!!!!!
Let's see: Â this rammed-thru clustereff has barely begun & we've already had multiple delays. Â Anybody wanna hazard a guess as to what the total cost & time overruns will be? Â Anybody wanna hazard a guess as to what % of travelers will avoid the tunnel/toll? Â Glad I'm outta here shortly - this thang ain't gonna get better anytime soon.
A little more info would be great. I checked some engineering books. Turns out the phrase we got us a little somthin' somthin' blockin' us here is not an acceptable answer. How is it that after nearly a month they can't get a better description than 'mysterious object'.
That's a whole lot of scrap metal sitting on ole Hwy. 99.....
Indian burial grounds,drilling must stop and a new viaduct erected.
Stargate's door....
I thought this story was going to be boring. It's not boring at all.
Just back out bertha a few feet and see what's in front! But whatever it is, they still have to remove it from the top, don't they? Hopefully it is not underneath a building.
The successful rail tunnel is a covered trench, the only kind that can be built at reasonable cost and safety in this type soil
i suspect that the boring will have to be abandoned and a covered trench style will be needed.
Btw bertha had major trouble cutting its way out of its launch pit... hmmm.
Meanwhile, i am working on a proposal to completely abandon the rich upper-crust real-estate tunnel and switch the money towards:
Something that will save lives....
 preparing Seattle & metro areas for a Fukushima sized quake with side reactions on the Seattle fault & others north & south.
 We need many neighborhood centers, with many supplies, about a mile apart in any direction.
Seattle will need appx 6-9 mo supplies.
 virtually all roads around Puget sound are elevated in numerous places, the plumbing and electric will be a total loss..
 Leaving the poor to fend for themselves will be a disaster 10x worse than the quake.
If we start now, it will be easy, and much cheaper.
OK, we have a long buried extraterrestrial artifact!!! Right!!! Â
Didnât someone say some time back that Bertha could go right through it? If not, I stand corrected. However, if I am correct, then why are they delaying the digging? Keep in mind, I am old, I am (thanks to modern chemistry) blonde, but this makes no sense to me, other than to run up the cost, that is. Â
I think the property owners and developers who stand to profit from this debacle should pay any and all cost overruns. The taxpayers are subsidizing a massive jump in a handful of property values, and we will see little, if any, return on the taxpayer investment. This is being paid for by the entire state, with limited benefit for anyone except those property owners - it reduces traffic throughput and makes moving cargo more difficult (no flammables in tunnels!), so not even locals are seeing much of a benefit.
There were less expensive, albeit less visually appealing, alternatives that would have been far more functional, yet we were forced into the most expensive, least functional alternative. If above ground highway structures are seismically unsafe, then I would argue that we should never build another bridge in this area - all underground tunnel interchanges.
And for anyone who wants to try the Embarcadero argument: the Embarcadero freeway was never finished, and it always dumped you onto surface streets - it was effectively an overglorified off-ramp from I-80 in San Francisco. It was not a major, mostly limited access highway that provided an alternate route across town like Highway 99 does in Seattle. The Embarcadero was roughly a mile long - Hwy 99 is mainly limited access and has no traffic lights for eight miles. So no, they are not functionally comparable.
We appear to have become obsessed with attractive, yet functionally useless infrastructure projects. Infrastructure is not pretty. Can it have aesthetically pleasing elements? Absolutely (check out the Art Deco elements to Hoover Dam, as an example). But systems such as water mains, storm sewers, expressways, and railroads are not designed to be pretty. If they are well designed, they are extremely functional and efficient. Artistic touches are a bonus, not a primary requirement.
Build something that works well - not something that looks pretty. So far, this project isn't even making it to the pretty part, let alone being functional or efficient.
I think it's former Governor Dixie Lee Ray.
Okay, I know that everyone has their opinions as far as whether the whole tunnel is feasible or not, which is a moot point--BUT...
How could the engineers not possibly see this before they started drilling? Latest and greatest infra-red, seismic technology, x-ray machines, what have you--and they could not see this before hand?
Not to be the bad cop here, but--somebody definitely needs to be written up over this or fired.
Now this whole thing is making Seattle a laughing stock. They'd better figure it out, and right quick!
Maybe they should dump bran muffins and coffee down the hole.Â
Tick..$$$...Tock...$$$...Tick...$$$...Tock...$$$...Tick...
Dig, baby, dig. The next step is to dig down and try to remove what ever is there. Sixty foot is just not that deep. The problem (in my inexperienced opinion) is what surface features (infrastructure, buildings, roadways, Puget Sou) would need to be demolished before the big "big dig."
The real laugh would be if the city ran into an aboriginal burial ground requiring another year for settlements with the tribes.
terry
Wouldn't hiring all those $15 minimum wage EX-Boeing workers to dig past the blockage be cheaper? In hindsight, maybe all those buried SPD dash cam videos blocking BERTHA would of been best be used as an artificial reef off the waterfront.
Add the tunnel machine as an attraction to the Seattle Underground Tour and make some real cash!!!
The alien's should have Seattle their offices empty soon as the number of ufo's flying over Whidbey island this month has increased greatly. lol
@Happi from the other side of the potential tunnel, and make this stall point the last to tackle.
@Happi That would be logical, except for one thing. Bertha has no reverse. Once tunneling is completed Bertha will be disassembeled and shipped off. Tunneling machines are not intended to go in reverse so they are never built with a reverse gear.
The Great Northern Tunnel was dug in the traditional manner, not by cut and cover. It's been around 100 years and is still solid. You can't cut-and-cover a tunnel that is going to be as deep as this tunnel will be, and there isn't room to put it closer to the surface due to the bus tunnel and the Great Northern tunnel.
@Circe Big Bertha can drill through granite and steel.  Big Bertha didn't hit anything.  It's likely sinking into a downward slop which it cannot drill since it's designed to drill on a level footing to my understanding.  They will likely have to back it out some and pour a concrete slab, and continue this procedure whenever it comes across soft fill spots.  This project will most likely double in price.
@Tisk Tisk Tisk LOL, okay that is a new theory...
@John Doe Not to be rude but it sounds like you don't even know whether they were capable of knowing about this blockage and yet you are calling for people to be punished.Â
X-ray and infared won't work. The seismic thing (kind of similar to what the movie "Jurassic Park") might be feasable. Don't know much in that area of science though.
Seattle was already a laughing stock when they agreed to pay 100% of the cost over runs instead of the state covering them. Laughing at you in Seattle.
@SissyYou got it, baby, every day there is a delay we're paying for it!
@dardena Lucky for the contractor there isn't anything over the TBM. They haven't tunneled out of their Work area yet.
Terry, it's Clamasaurous. Iver's dropped it off the truck by accadent in 1939 when they moved to down on the pier. They dropped it somewhere between Jackson and Main, and thought it made it's way back to Puget Sound, now they are thinking it burrowed.  Â
@TreeTopFlyerSomehow, I think they would make fun of the whole deal before it becomes a tourist attraction.
@nedflanders Yeah and no cost overruns because wages were $1 a week.
The GN tunnel was a privately financed project, not one paid for by taxpayers who insist on knowing how every dollar is spent.
@nedflanders Tactless, SHAME ON YOU.
You had some good points... until your last sentence. Sad, really.
@seattleemt @Happi OOPS! Perhaps they should have thought of that. After all, what goes up, must come down; Most other mechanical devices have been manufactured to go up and down, forward AND reverse. Again: OOPS!
Now, we could call her dodo Bertha.
@webby@Circe First off you cant back it out and second you cant pour a slab in front of it. You would grout from the surface.
@path_tech I know why infrared would be useless but why wouldn't x-ray work?
@John Doe@Sissy Its all part of a plan to create jobs.Remeber "jobs ,jobs, jobs".
Only you progressives who elect idiots are paying for it!
@John Doe @Sissy According to wikipedia, any and all project cost overruns will be paid for by "Seattle-area taxpayers." I'm not sure if that means only people within the city limits or not.
@Cecil C. AddleÂ
It's a bit of a broad brush, but in my experience,private investors want to know that every cent is well spent. They don't put up with incompetence nearly as much as public project managers.
Try and explain to a board of directors that after a month, you are still baffled as to what is blocking their pet most expensive machine of it's kind (and this one doesn't even go ping.)Â You wouldn't have to bother preparing a report for January.
@Circe@nedflandersI have no problem with what Ned sed. If I were a member of the Chinese community and my forefathers demonstrated an ability to construct tunnels successfully I would consider being asked a complement to my heritage The tunnel is going to cost us well over $1,000,000.00 per foot. Ya, a million. If the Chinese community wants to show is how it can be done for say $750,000.00 per foot then they can teach us a lesson here.
You do know that 500 people digging one foot per day (at $750,000/ft) would each be making $1,500.00 per day.
@webby@madminer15@Circe Sorry but no they cannot be backed out not even an inch. The most one could hope for is to retract the articulation cylinders, but that would probably be a foot at the most
@madminer15 @webby @Circe It doesn't have reverse, but the can back it out some contrary to popular belief.  And yes, they would pour the slab from the top nevertheless.
Too deep for X-rays. Backscatter is only good for shallow scans in the ground, and traditional X-ray needs a receiving plate on the other side of the object.
@justthinkin @Hountoof @John Doe @Sissy  "The city will pick up the tab by using funds that will create a crisis later."
What do you mean? Could you elaborate on this a little?
@Hountoof@John Doe@SissyRight... The city will pick up the tab by using funds that will create a crisis later. The state will then declare a state of emergency in Seattle so as to use state funds to make Seattle whole. That way we all will pay for this money pit.